How localization pros plan their budgets

Kate Vostokova 0:08 Okay, everyone is here. Hi, how are you? Good. Valeria Nanni 0:16 I so good to be here. Kate Vostokova 0:18 Oh, so, um, I think I'm passing like to you. I will just come back maybe to remind you about q&a session if you run out of time. So please, like, Belén Agulló García 0:34 thank you so much, Kate. And thank you, everybody, for joining us today in this super interesting panel, I believe. I'm Melina who your VP of learning and lead media researcher at NIMS insights. And the first thing that I'm going to do before we jump into the questions is to introduce our wonderful panelists, although many of you will already know them, but I want to to introduce them. So I will start with Valeria nanny who works as a localization manager at Skyscanner at the moment where she is responsible for workflows implementation, translation, technology quality, and the successful run of the localization operations. She started her career 10 years ago as a technical translator, and moved into web and mobile localization management in 2012. Since then, Valeria has covered several roles in tech companies focusing primarily on processes optimization, automation and machine translation. She holds a BA in translation and interpreting and an MA in cultural mediation. Welcome to the panel, Valeria. It's so great to have you. Thank you. Then we move to my Spanish friends, Miguel, let's start with Miguel after finishing his studies in computer engineering, began started his career in 1995, working for Microsoft Dublin, and providing linguistic QA. Later, he worked as a global localization manager for Lionbridge until 2007. When he left the vendor set and joined Electronic Arts as a Technical Solutions Manager at Electronic Arts. He was in charge of creating localization programs and automation solutions for blockbuster titles such as FIFA Need for Speed or the Sims in two in 2014. Miguel joined King, the maker of Candy Crush, I'm sure you're all familiar with this game. As a globalization director at King Miguel is responsible for adapting mobile games so that they resonate with global audiences. So if you're a gamer, I'm sure you know all the companies that we get word for in the last few years. So welcome, Miguel, it's so nice to have you, Miguel Sepulveda 2:42 given a much maligned. Valeria Nanni 2:44 And last but not least, we have Julio lair who is currently the head of operations at top content. Julio also has a degree in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Granada in Spain. And he has started his career in 1999, a little bit later than Miguel, on the vendor site of the language industry as well. After working for a number of different translation companies, he moved to the client side in 2007, quite similar to Miguel's trajectory. When, when he became an in house production and localization manager at AES SAE AP or sub, I don't know the pronunciation in English. In 2010, he took on his role at Siena, where he led the company's localization efforts from King's remote office in Malaga ever since. And yeah, in parallel with his work at Siena, Julio went on to obtain a degree in web localization management from sunrise University, a degree in global marketing from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, an MBA and most recently, an executive program in digital team managing men from the EA S. He also contributes to industry publication and speaks at industry events, as you can, of course see at the moment. So welcome, Julio. It's super nice to have you. Julio Leal 4:06 Thank you. And have your you Valeria Nanni 4:09 will have amazing experiences in the industry. And specifically in the in the vendor side, sorry, in the localization buyer services side. So this is great, because this is the topic that we are going to discuss today. We want to understand how it is for head of localization in an LSB to put together a budget, what are the challenges the KPIs that you have to measure, and all these interesting topics, and we might even talk about localization ROI, which is a topic that I know many people feels very passionate about. So let's just start with the first question. And I want to address the first question starting with Valeria. And I want to ask that when you're creating your localization budget, if you have to pick like three main things that you need to keep in mind, what would those be? So Okay, so we have, we can think about it in this. In this way, we can have the localization work. So all the localization initiative, the standard work that you that you usually do. So that will be the first thing that you think about with looking at your word count. What has been your word count during the previous year, how the word count as evolved through the years, and also anything, any other initiatives that you have in your localization team, for example, if you have a quality program, then you will have specific budget as well are located for that. So I would say first thing, the standard localization work. And then, as a second point, the anything any initiative that you know, that you will have to support your business with, so any business wide initiative that you know, they're coming, something different, maybe you're launching a new in a new market, so you will have to allocate resources for that as well. And then third point, the technology, so anything that is totally related, that will make your localization workflow work. So these are for me, the three main things to think about when creating budget. Perfect, Valeria. Thank you so much. That makes complete sense. And yeah, I want to ask for example, Miguel, if He also shares malarious views, or if you have something to add to it? Miguel Sepulveda 6:32 Yeah. So we have a three one of malarious. Those are important, I mean, what count and everything, it's, it's absolutely necessary. But to add more stuff, for me, the the three things that they want to add is the first would be to focus on language prioritization. And when building your budget, your localization plan, I have to make sure to include enough money to cover the languages that are important for our organization. So we should first identify the market we want to reach and then set up our strategy according unlink, that local regional strategy to deliver. The second would be prioritized type of content, based on the localization strategy, we want to apply. And with this, I mean, that the content we localize has different levels of visibility. Therefore, we must take the time to analyze the content, and its level of visibility or respected linguistic quality. So for example, marketing content has high visibility, so probably, we want to give it the best possible localization quality, and partner with local design agencies specialize in transcreation. And that localization approach for that particular piece of content will have a higher cost than the content we want to localize, such as FAQ, or technical documentation. So for that type of content, probably machine translation will do. And since the content of localization, marketing or legal with expert, local license will differ from a translation, it's important when creating the localization budget that we take the time to analyze the type of content and how we're going to localize it. And the third ones will be to save some money to put some money in the budget, to invest in innovation. And by innovation, I mean, investigating how you can automate certain tasks in your localization process, or look for tools to improve your thinking framework. I think that putting some money aside to explore how to work more efficiently is highly important. An assignment belt to illustrate this, I remember that a couple of years ago, I was in a situation where I wanted to explore a tool to automate the screenshots for the QA phase, and I did not have the money in my budget to run a pilot an asset, if that too could reduce the manual work we're doing for the LTO phase. So yeah, my Three Things for budgeting would be language priorities, content, disability, and save some money to invest in innovation. Valeria Nanni 9:38 That's wonderful. Miguel, thank you so much. I think it's super important to set aside some money for unexpected initiatives that you want to do in the following years, or even the ones that you already planned, but some things can can come up without expecting them. So I think that's very strategic and also the type of content because sometimes we only think about the word count, but it's not gonna was the same to translate the text and to machine translate the text. So I think that's very interesting. Thank you for sharing. And how about you, Julio? What are your top three things that come to mind when planning and localization? But Julio Leal 10:13 yeah, well, a little bit in line with what Valeria and Miguel what Shane priorities are very similar. But obviously, these priorities will always depend on your company industry if you're approaching a b2b b2c. So the top priorities will not always be the same across all companies across all different localization departments. So, pretty much in line as I said, the languages, bear in mind, if your company is going to be expanding into new regions and local market, just to see if you need to add a new language next to what you already have in production. Or even, you might be aware that your company may be may not be willing to move to do more business in certain markets. So that means that will mean that you might not need to incorporate or you might need to actually draw language for me. So you need to make sure that whatever language is your market is your company's next year you need to be there was a thing that would be about new content, but also the evolution of the content. In my experience that was very important with multimedia. When dealing with multimedia localization, especially at the very early stages of the program, you might start just know with some budget for easy translation of subtitles, or very rough translations for multimedia. But as the localization program gets more mature, you might start considering dubbing for the full localization of videos. And for that, obviously, you will need more money. And last but not least, you also need to talk to all the different departments within the corporation or the company you're working in. Especially Egypt budget is supposed to be funding all those localization requirements for all these different teams, just because you need to align your budget with those priorities. So what happens if the legal department or the product department, they are expecting more updates or more releases in the upcoming year than usual, okay, you need to be aware and communicate with them to make sure that all that money is properly assigned for those extra cards that may be coming your way. So in summary, languages, content types, and communication with other with other organizations within the company, to be aligned fully aligned with their priorities for the upcoming year. That's a Valeria Nanni 12:41 cool, thank you so much, I think you're the three of you are quite aligned in what's important for for to consider for a localization budget. So now we discuss where the money should go right or where the money goes. But let's go back a little bit. And let's think about where the money comes from. Because sometimes we assume that the localization budget is a unique budget. But that doesn't necessarily is the case. So I want to ask Valaria, for example, in your experience, where like the budget that you're going to use in your operations come from. So in my experience, the localization team always had the full control on the budget on any translation work for the overall company. What was different was the tooling budget. So anything related to translation technology was actually is actually coming from an engineering budget. So it's Julio was saying, it's really important to align and communicate with with other teams. And in our case, for example, for the with the engineering team, to make sure that for example, if we know that there are going to be changes in the budget for technology, then we need to agree on this in advance. Like you don't want to get to the point of having to present your budget and not having aligned. So it's, it's an exercise that it's it's through the year really is not just a budgeting season thing. One thing that I wanted to mention as well to the point that Julio was making about unexpected thing, because that's the thing now so you can, you can guesstimate, you can have an informed estimation, but it's still an estimation, you you might talk to different teams, and you will see that there are different priorities, you will see that there are new initiative coming but maybe there is something that falls through and that you you don't know about. And then at some point, you get a big project from a different spot. So one thing that we are doing right now is Skyscanner although we do cater for the translation, basically for the translation costs for the whole company, but if there is like a big project that comes our way really extraordinary. In that case, we would ask the team to request special budget for that and go through an approval process with finance and obviously, justify that before we actually proceed. So that's yeah, that's a bit how it works for for us. Okay, thank you, Allah. Yeah, it's very interesting that when you have this unexpected, maybe big projects that were not within your budget, you can negotiate with the department that is asking for that, and, you know, create a business case. So you ask for finance for the money together. I think it's great to have allies so that you, you don't need to take all the responsibility sometimes of the money that is spent in localizations. And thank you so much for sharing this, this nice feedback. And, Miguel, how about you? What's your experience with this? Miguel Sepulveda 15:47 You know, case? No, for example, again, the globalization team is set up as a shared organization. And we support all teams that need to localize content. By being set up as a shared organization, therefore, we have a centralized budget that covers all the localization needs that we may see throughout the organization. So in this case, yes, we are ready once again, for the party of having no content, localizing our games. Valeria Nanni 16:22 Perfect, Miguel, thank you so much. And Julio, what's your experience with with where the money comes from? Julio Leal 16:28 Yeah, my experience is very similar. We are, we are in a police station, internal team, we are shared services team. So most teams across organizations come to you to request translations or localization. But it's also true that there might be other departments with their own budget, that they may actually be doing things their own way. And they just may approach you because you know, their localization requirements get more complicated, they will just do it in a simple way. But when things get a little bit more difficult is when the produce. So the difficult part about that, or the challenging part of managing other departments budgets is, obviously you need to be sure that you to align their KPIs to yours or more the other way around your internal KPIs to them. So they can measure the impact of your localization efforts. So obviously, the KPIs that might be valid for marketing might not be the same for product, or they may be the same for engineering. So that's kind of a challenge and dealing with other people's money. The same with technology, in my experience, everything around technology, TMS, CMS, even though the localization department might be my might be the massive user or the owner of the platform, most of the time, that technology is always funded by the IT department. So every year, you need to be in touch with them, just to see if you're going to need new features. Actually, all you actually do are planning to move to a new platform just because they want you have is not working or is not flexible enough. So you need constant communication, you know, with it, and all the different departments that you are serving. Valeria Nanni 18:18 Perfect. Thank you so much, Julio, and it's funny that you mentioned KPIs a second ago, because it's a perfect segue for the next question. Now, we talked about where we should put the money, where the money comes from. But once you have the budget, and everything is like you have the money to spend, how do you keep track of that? How do you what are the type of KPIs that are associated with the localization budget? And what are the strategies that work to to have? Healthy, but for the entire year? So Miguel, do you want to comment on this topic, KPIs? And how do you do it that King Miguel Sepulveda 19:01 so for us, they must have to gather metrics around the actual cost of the localization. And then the strategy that worked for us is to close those actuals with a forecast and analyze the gap and deviation from the budget. That's, that's super important for us, we need to keep an eye to potential gap between the actuals and the forecast. So that's in terms of, of a strategy. And then in terms of best practices of budget management. Of course, it's important to track other finance metrics that can help us to evaluate their maturity. So we like tracking metrics such as the average, fully loaded cost per word with a breakdown per language, because there are different prices for the languages so it's an oughtn't to have that granularity, then the total average costs of outsource worse than the cost of the internal localization team. So all these metrics are very important to track. But what we pay a lot of attention during the whole year, usually deal in the quarterly check ins. Is that up? Is it what we forecast it for the year if it's actually matching the the actuals? Because it's it's very difficult to see the future, right. So this exercise with every quarter we see, okay, this is what we thought this is what it's really and see how we are doing. And if we are going to be with enough money or getting rid of money that isn't that crucial. So measuring the gap and understanding the internal costs on the outsource cost, is what I believe it's the minimum you need to include in your butt procurements system. Valeria Nanni 20:57 Okay, thank you so much, Miguel, for sharing. And what's your experience? Julio, do you agree with Miguel, or would you consider something else? Yeah, true. Julio Leal 21:05 I agree with Miguel. And what I would add to that is, at least in my experience, there is a huge difference when you are in a b2c environment, as opposed to b2b, to maybe to see gives you more visibility on the impact of where your localization efforts are going, you are able to measure that impact more easily in sales cycles, in b2b are totally different. It can be actually very long, depending on how large the companies. So that's another challenge that you might not have in a b2c environment. And also, I will make a distinction between online content and offline content. And I think that we are all familiar with, with these terms, in the sense that most translations are localization efforts, which are not tracked online, it's very hard to measure the impact of that, or know any multimedia efforts that you might do for an event or any collateral that you might create and localized for supporting local sales teams in specific regions, you don't really know what's the impact of all that material that you are localizing, for that you are just helping them. But there is no way to track the KPIs for that. So what I, in my experience, I always try to implement there are like three different sets of KPIs. One are more related to production itself, like, I don't know, like Nicolas was saying the average nine was quality, what are the delivery time when we have more fails and passes this kind of production environment that will tell us if we are doing well or not from an production perspective, then more strategic, so KPIs aligned to corporate objectives, just to see if your money is actually going in the right direction. And if you are actually investing in the right places where your company is supposed to be making more money. And then last but not least, KPIs related to ROI, which is again, another hot topic in the industry right now and how to measure the impact but there is no one model pitch all as we will discuss later. But this will be pretty much the KPIs that I would be looking at. Valeria Nanni 23:26 Perfect, Coolio. Thank you, thank you so much, and Valeria. More about the strategies that you use to you know, make sure that the budget is correct that you are on track and so on and so forth. Before you mentioned that it's not budgeting season, but it's more like a yearly conversation. Right? So I guess that is part of the strategy. Do you want to share about that? Completely? Totally. Right. So it's, it's, it's a proactive effort really to talk to all different teams, even if you're maybe talking to someone from from a team, and they mentioned that another team is working on something else, and you understand that this is something that you might have to deal with. So you know, proactively reach out to people. And make sure that you take note, you follow up conversations, you kind of try to preempt a situation where you might have this big project, right, that you weren't expecting. And also, you know, whenever you have company, dates or new company strategies to really forecast to see where the company is going and take up conversations with the relevant people to see if there are some things that you can already plan out so that you're already basically working on the budget already. Before before the budgeting season comes. Yeah. And then obviously, like I think Julio was saying that you leave yourself Have a buffer, little question, but not a big one. Because you know, at the same time, you have to also try to be as realistic as possible with, with the information that you have available and at the time. And also because, you know, if you if you plan, much bigger buffer and and it's also money that you're taking out from other teams, no, it's money that you can, the company cannot allocate for others. So don't go over the top, really and find to keep safe with money. And then a conversation worth having is what I was mentioning before, you know, that like kind of agreeing, agreeing with finance or with whoever is the decision maker for you for the budgeting approval, that, you know, explaining the nature of localization work, the fact that you support the rest of the company, and that there might be expand expected things coming your way. So having that opportunity, the possibility to add more budget, if needed, obviously, we're justification. But you know, having that agreement in place, I think it's better, that you know, something that you discuss already. And if things happen, then you can go and speak to finance and agree on, you know, some more budget and have a place, you know, potentially a single place where you check on your finances, sometimes it's, it's difficult, you know, we work with different tools, we might have our costs in different spreadsheets or tools. So you know, try to maybe have have it all in one place. And check it regularly. And one thing that worked for me in the past was having a regular catch up with finance every three months, that was where we would actually meet and assess know how we were doing in terms of budgeting for localization that we spent, where we thought, where we maybe very low on spend compared to what we had forecasted, or, you know, maybe we had to make some adjustments. So that's something that you know, it's very simple. And that forces you as well, to keep an eye on things and to align with finance, throughout the journey without having to get through to the last moment, you know, and having everything still to evaluate. So So yeah, that's a bit. These are the strategies that I've been using in the past. Perfect. Well, I thank you so much, so many good practical tips that you can start implementing in your operations. And, yeah, I mean, you all sound super experienced and super mature at the moment, of course, because you've had a lot of experience. But I'm sure some of these lessons or some of these strategies might have been learned the hard way by committing some mistakes or, you know, learning things by by doing them and then understanding that things should be done in a different way. So any of those lessons learned that you would like to share when it comes to budgeting, for example, Miguel? Miguel Sepulveda 28:08 Yeah. As localization, globalization themes, what I like to display nowadays, is that we don't control the demand. That's a pitfall that I suffer in my career, because I struggle to explain that properly. We don't control the demand. We have to repeat that as many times as necessary to the product teams, and especially to the finance teams when we are in the budget forecasting season. Because I have seen myself throughout my career situations where I've been asked to reviews my globalization budget or, or be with a cost flat, similar to the previous era. And yes, of course, we can look for ways to be efficient in the use of our budget. Still, no matter how many efficiencies we look for, a localization team does not control the demand of the content to be localized. If there is content to localize, and there are many requests from our stakeholders, then a localization team has to help them to have the content localized. Good could not make sense is that the content is not localized, because the budget is over. So in the end, whether the localization budget is over or not, in most cases, it's related to higher demand than anticipated. So it's crucial to explain to our finance stakeholders that local exempting does not control the demand when it comes to budget and forecasting. The product owner are the ones who control the demand. We help them execute the product vision. If that vision requires a lot of content, that is something that the localization team cannot control. At best, we can influence demand This decision, but in the end, we are a team that helps other teams. And we are not the ones who create the product. Therefore, the localization budget is driven by external factors that we don't control. Valeria Nanni 30:15 Yeah, that's very, like, super big truth of how to handle the localization budget and making people understand like, I'm not the one, you know, spending the money because I want to, but they receive the content, and then I have to do it. And I, if the people who are creating the content, don't tell me exactly what content and how much they're going to create. Of course, you can have, of course, strategies to see trends over the past few years, and so on and so forth to have a good estimate. But still, it's not 100% under your control. So that's a very good lesson learned to share. Thank you, Miguel. How about you Coolio, anything you any lesson learned that you want to share with us? Julio Leal 31:00 What to say just finally, because I think it's something that happens to everyone in a similar position is like, you know, when you are just running out of money, and your managers are complaining about hey, how can you just come out, you know, run out of badgers and just eat away and yours or hey, I mean, you are not responsible for the content coming my way. So we we are not producing that content. So lessons learned the hard way, definitely preparing for the unexpected. Many, many times, when you are putting all your plan and all your actions for next year, you draft the budget, contact all the different departments, this is what is actually going to happen. And then a few months later, after having that budget in place and having everything set up to to execute that budget. All the plans just are not valid anymore. And I can give you a few examples. In one of my previous companies. In the upcoming year, we were planning everything for four for bringing our company into Israel. So basically, we started, you know, recruiting people for Hebrew with our Korean style guide, and you know, everything, all the environment that you need in order to support a new language from scratch. That's especially challenging for a man with like Hebrew, is not a stylist, not Italian, is a very challenging language. So just a few months into the new year, and we have already kind of recruited all the team, the company decided that that market was no longer a target for us. And all the plans and all the investments that we have made, were just going to waste. And that happened in other cases, not maybe with local markets, but maybe with different content types. Like when you are planning just a series of multimedia localization. And everyone knows that multimedia is extremely, extremely expensive. Suddenly, there is a huge demand for that content within a specific department. And you just basically do not have the money to support that demand. And you just run out of budget immediately. So you need to start asking for people to start finding those immediately to themselves. So definitely prepared for the unexpected. Always leave a buffer of whatever saying always leave a buffer in your budget to make sure that the unexpected will be somewhat covered. Valeria Nanni 33:34 That's a very good point. Thank you, Miguel, I like to use the example of multimedia content because we've been hearing that for many LSPs like Okay, now we have to do video and everybody's complaining, it's too expensive. So how you manage the expectations? And how can you keep up with the quality if people were not expecting that video was going to be so expensive? So that's a very good example of the unexpected part of the budget. And how about you Valaria any lessons learned that that you want to share? So just to add something different compared to what Miguel and Julio said. For me, it was a bit challenging to start working with tools or services that have an incremental payment model. So like you said, you know, there is a really quite a lot of uncertainty and you know, you have to expect the unexpected and loads of things that you can control and like Miguel was saying we don't control the demand. So the using these kind of tools or services can add another layer of uncertainty, because you might reach a certain threshold where you have to pay more, you go to a different tier, a higher tier, and that will add to your budget right so during your budgeting exercise you will have to add estimate the amount of content that you will get, for example, and then see if this how much more is this compared to previous years? And is this going to affect than the threshold that I have? So it's just something to keep in mind. If you work with tools or services that have this type of model, it's just a bit trickier. I found my experience. Yeah, that's, that's a very good example. And yeah, maybe more transparent pricing models are more like straightforward would be a better idea for language technology companies, but it's something to take to take into account for sure. Great. So let's jump into the next question. We have been talking about the priorities where the money comes from the lessons learned the strategies and everything. But now, when you have to go to your other stakeholders and get buy in for your budget, have you ever had any problems, any issues trying to convince people that you had to have this budget? Or in your experience? What's the best way to communicate your localization plan your localization budget plan to other stakeholders in your company? Maybe Miguel wants to start with this one. Miguel Sepulveda 36:17 Yeah, so So for me, the main challenge lately is not about convinced them for the budget approval, because as I mentioned earlier, localization budget is coming from our cost center, not from the from the game teams. And it's been the same in other companies in the gaming industry I've been so it's not about convince them. Because because we are the ones begging for that. So the then the challenge associated with that be known and have the budget is to get enough reliable data to try to forecast the cost of the following year, in a realistic way. Because in the gaming industry, for a game team, it's really difficult to know the number of words, even roughly, that they might need, it's really difficult, they have an idea about the futures, they want to implement the game modes they want to include, of course, they know that there is going to be a cost associated with that. And that we will have to translate the tutorials, the UI, the marketing, material, everything, still didn't really have reliable data. And numbers. So that's where I see the main challenge for us. Because it's, it's difficult to have these these numbers come in coming from the side. Luckily, now we have some historical data that we've been collected in the last year. So we can work in a kind of analogous estimation based on historical data, and try to predict the future based on the past. But generally speaking, the number one challenge is that you go to a game team, and you try to estimate the costs for the year, and they don't have any clue they are gonna explain you what they are going to build. But then bringing that Bishan to localization cost. It's is difficult if you don't have some historical data to help you here. So that's more like the challenge. We will suffer more than convince them to, to approve it. Because they don't we are the ones covering the cost. Valeria Nanni 38:40 Okay, very good one. Yeah. Like, lack of visibility is a nightmare. I guess when planning your Miguel Sepulveda 38:45 year? Yeah, because they are creative people. They are painting walls and characters finding stuff. So if I go on, okay, but how many works is like, what? Valeria Nanni 38:59 Yeah, that's, that's a very good point. Yeah. And, Julio, how about you any challenges trying to get by in some time from other stakeholders or any experience communicating localization budget plans to your team? Julio Leal 39:18 Yeah, a lot of challenges. And again, it also depends on the culture, the localization, culture and maturity of that company. I remember my, in my early days, that those conversations were more difficult just because localization was still not as present as it is these days. So you really have to try hard to prove the value of localization and what the impact for that is on the company. I have to admit, I always found a little bit unfair that localization is always under the pressure to prove the value whereas there are other organizations within companies like branding that they don't really have, we don't seem to have the pressure, like how do you measure the impact of branding in a company? How do you relate to more sense? So that reimagined came to the realization that we always have to be proving ourselves how much value we bring to the company. So what we what I learned along the years is that you need to actually speak the language of your stakeholders. That's something that has been repeatedly communicated in many research. But it's 100%. True. So don't talk to the don't talk about team leverage or internal KPIs that might be totally irrelevant to the stakeholders that will be supporting your budget. Instead, make your team be seen as a revenue generator for the company prove the value of the implementation. And once you are able to prove all the value that the localization department brings, all those conversations become more and more less stressful, to have easier conversations, because you don't have that as threads to communicate the value the understand the value. And actually, those conversations are more related to hey, how much money will you need next year, how we can improve the technology that we have right now in place, about headcount. So all those difficult conversations, and in the end date become more and more fluid, you can prove that there is an intrinsic value of localization within any role strategy for an international company. Yeah, I Valeria Nanni 41:35 completely agree with you fully. Thank you so much for for sharing that. And we're most the time of the QA. So I want to give the floor to Valaria. To add to this last question. Yeah, so in my experience, I never had to fight or convince finance, for example, to get the localization budget approved. What what I had to talk about and convince management about was more conversation around like what you're seeing just now, for example, maybe team expansion, or, you know, changing tooling or you know, maybe in some cases, changing vendors. So in those conversations, yes, you have to talk the language of your stakeholders, as Fuller was saying, understand what's important to them? What is it that they want to know? How is this relevant to them? No, because as he was saying, like, maybe it doesn't matter to them? How many? What is translation memory? You know, maybe what they want to what they want to know is, how much faster will the product strings get updated? For example, no? Or how much money will we save on the long run? How is this we're going to facilitate maybe the life of people who need to submit translation requests. So these are all things that you can add in your conversation to, you know, to make your case, but at the moment of then getting your budget approved, you would have already had all these conversations by the time of budgeting. So So yeah, my experience, the convincing part comes before the budgeting approval. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. So yeah, I think we are in the last 15 minutes. So if you agree, we will go to the questions from from the audience, although I had three more questions for you if we have time. But let's let's prioritize the question from the audience. First, let me have a look at this. I think there are some old questions because I'm not Rachel and we didn't talk about transcreation. Probably, this is from another panel. Javi was also from the previous panel. Okay, no, Kate Vostokova 43:49 I think he should see. I'm not sure but there is an open open questions answered questions. So just look at awkward questions. Okay, you only relevant to you. Valeria Nanni 44:01 I see. I mean, the open questions tab, and they're still old questions, but I don't know why. But I see all these previous Kate Vostokova 44:08 really strange because I clean them up really? Or Valeria Nanni 44:12 maybe I might Zoom is locked or something. It's okay. I miss scrolling down and I can see Kate Vostokova 44:19 this would be the first person who asked you the question. So if you see him Valeria Nanni 44:23 then yes, perfect. Yeah, I will start with Mario. Okay, so Mario Thomas from this data is saying my company has a top down approach on budget. It's limited but I have no visibility on how much that is. And I have to ask the upper management for more details. How do you suggest the sub the subject be broached? Any of you won't want to take this one. When you have no visibility and you have to as the upper management management For more details, Miguel Sepulveda 45:02 I would suggest Mario that he follows also a top down approach with upper management. So he could start understanding which are the markets they are going to operate. So that will give you the idea of the languages. Then another level down, which are the type of content you have there. It's the interrupting software, content, and technical documentation and social media and blah, blah, blah, so trying to get different categories. So to create, like a kind of table in Excel or something like different categories. And then you go one level down again, and try to get one sample. So if it's software, what's the average length of that piece of software? So is it 1000 words, 10,000 Words 100,000 Words. And then use that as a kind of weight point system and multiply that by as many features as it could be, if it's technical documentation, try to estimate one article or one whatever, and multiply x times for for this, and the same for social media, depending on what they need to localize. So, ultimately, up and management will need to give him some sort of visibility, he cannot create this from from nothing. So starting Forum, which are the markets, then go into the content, and then getting one to just do some estimation, that could be one possibility that perhaps can help him. Valeria Nanni 46:46 And you agree to that, just wanted to mention that maybe you can also start having like more regular cooktops, or, or find someone in upper management, who is a bit more receptive about localization work, and start working with them and create a relationship. So then you work with them through the year, and by the time it's next year, you will have maybe a bit more visibility that will open up a bit if you also explain, you know, why this approach is blocking you. So you know, what is it? What are what are the challenges that this is posing for, you know, and then you can transform this a bit through time. Julio Leal 47:29 And if I just made two, because I think that, at some point, we've all that in that situation would be like, if that's the process they have year after year, maybe, sometimes, Organization Department, they just do whatever they can to actually comply with their requirements or try and find upper management, they also need to learn the hard way. So you know, if they are not giving you any visibility on the matter, you have to just do your best. And if you just run out of budget, mid year, like this is what you got, right? So this is a way of, you know, upper management learning, okay, we were not funding support, or they would have to find money somewhere else. So, you know, this kind of learning the hard way can not only be always for the purchasing department, so they don't get the divisional where they can do a proper job. Valeria Nanni 48:17 Thank you all for answering so thoroughly, Mario's question. The next question is about tools. This is an interesting one. So Martines began, sorry, if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly, is asking what tools or approaches do you use to forecast? What markets and what content should be prioritized for the next year? Do you use any type of tools to help you make business decisions? I don't know Julio Mian. Julio Leal 48:46 Favorite are some research tools means he has many of those that they can kind of predict the revenue that he didn't get by introducing your product in a new market. So you can get an ROI estimation in terms of content, basically just approaching all the different content creator departments within the corporation and just see what the estimation for next year and for that I cannot never stress enough, the importance of global sort of corporate wide CMS, you know, global repository of content in which all the different departments posted content, very useful content. And actually, you can see all the localization requirements coming your way. So that's really Valeria Nanni 49:37 perfect. Thank you, Julio. Miguel, you want to add something or Valeria? Miguel Sepulveda 49:43 Yeah, in terms of tools for apps that they are for the mobile world. I have just looker. And it's quite powerful. Because you can have metrics of everything that is happening in your mobile and You can customize the dashboards to do you can do a lot of stuff, the model forms nowadays, they're full of data. With Looker, you can can go deeper. And therefore the web pages, Google Analytics is really good. And then you can have your tables where you can have one table for number of unique visits from target local, or organic traffic by location or number of pageviews by target local run, and you can have all that that is going to be the metrics you have for the different languages. So that's, that's really helpful, because it's another way of showing the impact of localization. Belén Agulló García 50:46 Perfect, thank you. Thank you, me and malaria. On Valeria Nanni 50:49 my side, actually, when it comes to, you know, markets to be prioritized, that's more something that it's like, localization is more a contributor to that. But the decision makers are actually, you know, product and marketing organization. So we'd have prioritized markets, company wide, and we will be in the discussion, but we will be the decision makers on land. But when it comes to the content that should be prioritized. I agree with folio. So it's all a matter of really talking to different content creators. But one thing that for example, we are thinking of doing right now, Skyscanner is looking a bit holistically at our content and understand all the different contents that we have out there. And and then use these insights to see what is the purpose of each type of content that we have? And you know, how often things get updated, for example, in which part of the user journey? Do users see the content and evaluate the quality of that and then prioritize as well? The, you know, how to translate the content? Or how, how much resources, how many resources to put into that. But it's just the work that we started doing right now. But I think it's very valuable. You know, if this if you have availability for that, to really have a mapping of your content to have your content landscape, and then based on that working with different teams and prioritize it, so it's this more of a pragmatic approach that we will try out. Wonderful, thank you so much for sharing super valuable insights. So we have two questions that I really liked. They are kind of connected, but I'm not 100%. Sure. So I'm going to try to ask them at the same time. So curious, he's asking about investing into quality, you know, what does it take to justify that to your stakeholders? So that's one thing. And Jose B, is also asking about the basically the localization ROI. So how do you, you measure the impact of localization on the success of your company's product service? This is something I've been asked as a means to show justify budget. So I know it's not exactly the same, but quality is also related to the impact of localization. So I don't know we get Do you want to share some views about the showing the impact and the impact of quality as well, in the work that we do? Miguel Sepulveda 53:28 Quality is a great question. It's a difficult one in many situations, because there are different concepts of what quality means. And there is even a cultural component. For me, as a Spanish person, I can be more tolerant towards some euros than perhaps a Japanese person. So there's going to be different definition of quality. And that's something that we need to factor into the into the software. So nowadays, for me, what what I do to measure the quality is just to ask the users in case the players, if they are happy, that's good enough, maybe it's not perfect, but that's good enough. So getting access to the end user feedback. That's, for me, the best way of assessing the quality otherwise, through complex tables and everything. It's nice to have. But ultimately, it's what in our case, the players are saying so if they like that, then that's that's enough. And in terms of the other one of the ROI, I think it's as you were framing the question, there's not going to be an answer that you are going to be completely confident doing that unless you have an AV test. And that's the best way to compare localized versus non localized because you are going to have many metrics that you can that you can think about measuring the impact But ultimately, you need a baseline to compare. So if you are developing a webpage, and you want to know the, the impact of localization, you just need to compare. And you just need to show to some users, the Inglis and others, the localize. And then what did usually happens, or I always saw is that the localized version is outperforming the English one. But do you need a B to test because you can always have like the number of, of, I don't know, new subscriptions that you have in webpage. But you will not know the meaning of the number if you don't have a baseline to compare. But you will have it if you have Inglis, and then another one. And that's the value of localization. That's how you pitch the impact of localization. And from that maybe you can build upon, but always you need something to start with the compilation, otherwise, the matrix, they are just these numbers. But what they really mean is what do you need to do is to convince the upper manager, so AB test is my favorite technique to pitch the importance on the impact of localization. Valeria Nanni 56:17 Perfect, thank you. Thank you so much, Miguel, malaria, for example, about quality, and he didn't make the comment that he was not asking about measuring quality, but justifying quality investment in quality. So maybe you want to take on that one. Yeah, so I agree with Miguel, regarding the user experience, not international user experience. So I suppose that's one thing that you can take to justify investment in quality. No, because if you see that there is a problem in specific market, then you know that users are upset, or they cannot use the tool or I don't know, maybe the purchase the cannot go through then in that case, there is something that you have to do and investigate, it's not in quality. So that could be one like the most probably the most powerful thing is if you notice that there is a problem with users. And that's the main thing that, you know, management will care about. But also in our case, for example, we wrote a bit the wave of you know, there was a creation of a new strategy for the company. And there was a steer on improving the quality of the product in general. So for example, you can use this kind of, you know, company, strategy themes that you see or pillars, and you can attach localization to that. So use that as proving that you have to do measurement for localization. And another thing that you can do, you can start small, you can start with maybe some tests that really don't cost much. So you can still use your budget for that. And then once you see and you prove that there are issues with quality, that in that sense, you can already bring those data to management, and then say, hey, here, we have to invest more. So I would say these are three things that would work. That's wonderful. Valyria super practical, and very wise tips. Thank you so much. And we only have one minute left. So I want to give some space to Coolio to also comment on quality and rewards. If that's fine, or Kate, do we have to live already? Yes, it's fine. Kate Vostokova 58:32 Let's just take one minutes, and then we'll switch to the next. Julio Leal 58:36 Perfect. Okay. Yeah, very quickly, I mean, very good points, both from the local area. Obviously, they make total sense. My only final note would be that quality is actually what we're going to we're saying sometimes it's just good enough by the enough quality for the point. So actually, the evolution of quality might be totally different in the early days of the of the localization problem, as opposed to where it is at the very end your requirements may be different, just because your maturity is also changing. And last but not least, the quality must be also certified by department. So the quality and standards that you may have product or engineering may be totally different to the standards that you may have for marketing, for instance, with maybe a little bit more demand and so you know, we need to compensate all these different variables when designing. Valeria Nanni 59:34 Perfect, thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. It's been wonderful. I know there are many questions on answered they hope we can get to them later in another format. So yeah, just thank you look from home and thank you the bunnies for this wonderful conversation. Yes. Kate Vostokova 59:46 Thank you everyone for joining