In Search of Respect: Building Successful Relationships with Localization Stakeholders

Max Morkovkin 0:05
Now, I think we are really good to introduce our next speaker, Anastasia, and Rihanna from data DAC. And there's actually a little story about Anastasia and how she decided to become a presenter on work from home. She was attending our previous event in February, and she was really interested in the presentation of David during NEC, and they connected in LinkedIn. They were chatting about challenges for localization managers, and David encouraged Anastasia, to come to the next platform home and share with you guys her experience and how she organized a localization process in your company. So probably not probably I'm sure it will be very interesting presentation. And very useful for you guys. Anastasia, you're already here.

Anastasia Taymanova 1:05
Hi, Max. Yeah, I'm here. Hi, everyone.

Max Morkovkin 1:09
Thank you very much to make this decision. I know it's your first time as a speaker. Don't worry, relax. We have a very nice audience. Guys. Let's support Anastasia would be great if you can send something in chat to get started.

Anastasia Taymanova 1:28
Thank you guys. So I think we can start. Hopefully, you can see my screen.

Max Morkovkin 1:36
I have shared. We can see your screen. Yeah, we'll go.

Anastasia Taymanova 1:39
So guys. Thanks again for having me today. I'm really excited to take bite to take part in today's look from home. Okay, let's start with a few words about myself. My name is Anastasia Romanova. I lead a localization team at data Duck. Duck is an international digital marketing agency. Our company is specialized in in promotion of FinTech products. We work globally providing complete support in launching marketing campaigns for our FinTech customers. We do various sorts of advertising, mostly digital advertising. And our activities actually include creative copywriting, content marketing, we have our own in house video production team. We also take care of design, we run a lot of web and development projects. And of course, we have our internal localization team for all of that. When I joined that dark three and a half years ago, the company was just at the very beginning of its its expansion into the global market. And I have channeled the difficult and interesting way, starting with short and chaotic messages in our corporate messenger slack. Like for example, translate the packshot in different languages, a SAP or the guys from legal team say it it is translated wrongly. But the changed, we did a bit bit by bit, we did great work, and very hard work. And at the end, it turned to a flawless workflow for localization of different advertising types considering all of our customers needs. And now that we have created the streamlined, streamlined localization workflow, my team has grown from one person to five, I think that's not only about organizational and technological aspects which were important on this path, but it is also about the human factor. It is about the ability to build relationships with localization stakeholders and cross functional teams. So as they become aware of internal localization workflow, the ability to get colleagues from other teams to consider and respect the specifics of localization in their product and project planning is essential. And today, I will focus on the key problems that the data doc localization team encountered in building relationships with their colleagues, from product and marketing teams and share my experience and some tricks of how we managed to overcome these problems and manage to ensure a fast and effective collaboration across the company. Let's step aside from discussing pure technological things and talk, talk more about relationships. Okay, there are three points I believe we should focus on today. The first one is about correct position. I'm going to speak about how to position how I positioned myself as a localization team in order to build localization awareness throughout the company. Then I'm going to speak a bit about how to educate and nurture colleagues steadily. And then I'm going to talk about which advantages the properly set up communication brings in combined with collaboration, it's about creating partnerships between the localization team and its stakeholders. Okay, let's talk about positioning. It's successful relationship depends on how the parties actually understand the purpose of their relationship. While building my localization workflow, I realized that I had made a big mistake for a long time I sought my team is a kind of internal translation agency. And I had positioned myself and my team in accordance with that fact. And this was quite normal for me, because I got an extensive background in the translation industry, as both translator and project manager for for translation agencies. On the on the one hand, it helped me a lot, the experience I gained allowed me to quickly build the workflow in the right way from the get go. I mean, purely organizational things like selecting the right TMS and CAD tools, establishing Qi workflow, finding vendors, setting up terminology, glossary and keeping it up to date. But on the other hand, at a certain point, I realized that I was separating myself too much from the company as a whole, and from other teams and colleagues, in particular by positioning my team as a translation agency. But I was already functioning as a part of a marketing agency with a very specific FinTech orientation. That's, that sounds obvious, but through being part of the same company, teams need to work closely together and, and to be open to each other because we have common goals. And it isn't a mistake to view your own department as a cog in the machine to focus solely on your job responsibilities, and not seek to understand how other teams do their job. If you want to make others respect you and consider your workflow in their planning, you have to take steps forward to your colleagues and out of your comfort zone. And this is a very productive approach. By the way. With this in mind, I have formulated three basic rules that I think every in house localization team should always follow. The first and the most important one is learn the product you are localizing. You don't have to be a keen user, an expert in it or even a fan of the product. However, it is important to know its basic features and the interface to make this easier in your company. Employees hold in my company sorry, employees hold special and regular product training sessions. We talk about the features of FinTech products, learn the basic mechanics, etc. It is also customary for us to regularly publish news related to the release of the next version of the product in our corporate messenger. The second rule, research what other teams are doing, be curious, get to the bottom of it. It is customary for us to have demo presentations, in which colleagues from different teams talk about what they do their areas of responsibility, and share their expertise. Each theme also has its own channel on Slack, where they share news and important changes. It is also very helpful to understand who's responsible for what especially if the company is growing rapidly. And it is convenient to keep to keep an organizational chart always on hand. So you can quickly find information on who to write or or call when you need it. And after all, it is very exciting process. Our agency has a niche FinTech specialization, but I have learned a lot about the workflow of creating advertising, about video production, workflow, user acquisition technology, design trends, etc. And thirdly, do not be afraid of requests which are not directly related to your area of responsibility. Don't be in hurry to say no. First, I think about how I can help my colleague, even it is not quite it even it is not directly related to localization. People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Building relationships with other teams often means working outside our direct sphere of responsibility, but your efforts won't be forgotten by your colleagues. This is also very exciting and allows you to learn a lot and to establish useful connections across the company. For example, in the past when telling other teams about my work, I liked to point out not only what the localization team does, but also advocate for what we don't do, because we have other teams for that. And here are the three statements. I like to point out while explaining other teams what I do. The localization team does not create content, because we have a special creative team for that. The localization team doesn't do market research or text adaptation because we have a content marketing team. And the localization team does not do the markup because because we have development team for that. But now, I'm not that categorical in my wording. It might sound a bit vague, but at least it shows that I'm ready to help, even if it's not quite my area of responsibility. And for example, being asked to translate something so that it works well. I don't know in Vietnam or in Thailand. Nowadays, that frustrates me a lot less than it did some time ago. To summarize it, do your best to help your colleagues. And don't be afraid to learn something new. It isn't a question of where the lines of responsibility should be. And often, it makes sense to soften the environment and find out what's beyond your sphere.

The next, the next aspect of building relationships with localization stakeholders, successfully is the education aspect. When demonstrating my productivity, I always remember to methodically remind my colleagues what my team's workflow looks like to increase our relevance. We all know that people only pay attention to localization when things go wrong. So let them learn more about what you're doing. And how do how you do that. As I mentioned earlier, we have a widespread practice of holding demo presentations, and lectures in which colleagues talk about their workflow, and teach others how to properly interact with their team. In my lectures, I help my colleagues better understand how localization affects their own team's success, so they start to pay more attention to us. And that ensures our continuous corporate visibility. Of course, lectures alone are not enough and not everyone has the time to attend them. And it is very important to capture the workflow in writing and keep it always up to date. Fortunately, there are many handy online tools for this, I have written several concise instructions that document what a localization team is what we do, how to create a task for localization, how to write the task, brief, etc. I made the separate descriptions about the localization workflow for specific ads and specific types of documents. I added a few articles was basic information about localization. And on this slide, you can see a screenshot from our Confluence workspace. That includes all the topics I think are crucial for my colleagues from other teams to know. I always keep handy a demo presentation about localization teams work, and I use it when I meet new key people in the company. The setup meetings help learn more about each other's workflow and core competencies and agree about further cooperation. Unfortunately, many people will still argue that education and the sorts of evangelization are fine. But not everyone is prepared to be educated actually, for a variety of reasons that might be lack of time or just laziness. Therefore, in practice, localization teams keep getting questions from their colleagues, which can cause all shades of negative reactions from from the sentence smiles to eye rolling, and outright anger. And here are my top three and nine questions I received from localization stakeholders. I'm sure they look very similar to what you also have in your experience. Okay, the first one is my favorite. And I think that many people just don't get and will never get one cut, what context is and why it's so important. The second question came from from the development team. It's about time sensitive projects, and we know what it is. And we know the time sensitive projects are typical for agile development and continuous localization Sure. But in this case, it's not about speed. I mean that some colleagues assume that it's okay to put their workflow on the same line with your workflow. And yes, I think that localization may last over five days, that's okay with us, but not with other teams who assume that we do just instantly. And here is the third question on my top three, I think there's actually nothing to command here. And when I get get something like this, I even don't explain people that we not only translate, translate this on one line was our when vendors, we might have an extra editing task for that one line. But if I, if I tell, tell some of my colleagues that truth, maybe that will really blow their mind. So if you want to learn how to put up with this, just realize one simple fact, colleagues don't have to know the details of your work, they don't have to understand how hard it is for you. Hence, be patient and friendly. And try not to let your emotions get the better of you. But if it already happened, and you somehow lost your temper, then just do your homework. Arrange a meeting with your colleague, discuss the reasons of conflict and think about how to avoid such incidents in the future. Now that many people work from home, written communication has increased. And we all know that written communication in isolation is fraught with tendency to read between the lines and consequently escalate conflict. Hence, live meetings are crucial. The beginning, I mentioned that it's important for the for the localization team to position itself properly in order to align with the company's goals. And the backbone of such positioning is without a doubt, communication, any successful relationship is built on proper communication. Communication refers to the interaction between localization team and their stakeholders or partners. And if communication results in collaboration, then that's a perfect outcome. Where can I get the doc I have seen how communication with colleagues can lead to successful collaboration. And I would like to give a couple of examples from my experience. The first example is about embracing useful integrations, and it relates to collaboration with a development team. At some point, we realized that both sides were uncomfortable sharing translation files in the way it worked at the time, the developers were not happy with the speed. We as a localization team, were not happy with our workload. So we came up with a solution that suits everyone by developing an in house system to quickly solve some translation issues. Additionally, the smartcard platform helped us a lot. A big advantage of the smartcard platform is its open API. It allowed us to set up continuous content localization without any problems. Our development team created a system to handle localizable content for their needs, and connected it to our corporate SmartCAT account. So no more manually uploading files to project exchanging emails was aided, the whole process now takes place in a single environment. And you can see the screenshot from that environment. And it connects developers, testers, editors, project managers, and other teams, team members, and translation automatically follows development. Developers now take make changes to source files and send them to the repository, which is linked to them SmartCAT the files automatically appear in the project and work can start on them right away. As soon as the translation is finished, the localized file is sent back to the developers. And here's the second example, that illustrates how useful it can be to learn from other teams and learn from their experience. Our information security team came up with a cool solution for solving user problems across the company using our Slack messenger. They automate the workflow in their corporate channel on Slack, where colleagues address all kinds of kinds of queries. We implemented a similar solution in the localization Slack channel. This need was due to the fact that the localization team also gets a lot of questions and queries related to localization, but not necessarily leading to a separate task in Our task tracker Jira, which is our, our core main task tracker. And solving such questions in personal messaging is quite difficult because there's a risk that messages get lost. That's why we have created the channel and partial partially automated the workflow there. So how does it actually work? When somebody. So here we can see a screenshot, or with an example of a request in that localization channel. And every time a localization manager sees, or gets notification about a new message in this channel, the manager can set a certain reaction below the post, you can see the eyes reaction. And

after we said this reaction, the bot shows up in the thread and notifies that the question was taken to work and create good responding micro task in a specially created interface. And when the issue is solved, the localization manager sets another reaction, it's memo reaction, then the task is automatically closed. And the author receives a readiness notification, asking him for feedback. This system allows us to structure the flow of requests. And a separate interface behind slack allows us to keep statistics on the amount of work done and track efficiency through feedback. Okay, now that I have covered all my key points in detail, I would like to summarize them to three key takeaways, key rules that they try to follow in my work, be open to your colleagues, educate them and collaborate with them. I hope this has been has been helpful for you. Thank you for your attention. I'm happy to answer your questions.

Max Morkovkin 22:15
Anastasia, thank you very much. Let me just read one comment from chat from Sarah. I really relate to what you say Anastasia, thanks a lot. Communication and collaboration is the key. Thank you. Okay, let's announce the gift. What what, what is the book? Let me quickly check, I think oh, yeah, it's it's the legendary Black Swan. Yeah, by Nassim Taleb. So this will be the gift for the best question. Okay, so let's start. Wow, we have six worlds for one of the questions. Why is localization and content? Not one team?

Anastasia Taymanova 23:03
Thank you for that question, by the way. Okay. I see it as a best practice in many companies that localization and content are one team. I can say, Well, speaking of our company, it's the way how it how it went from the very beginning. I mean, I was hired as an only localization manager, and then just turn that. So the situation developed in that way. So we work as separate team, and that suits all the needs. So I mean, that that collaboration between localization team and content team works fine. In stops in, in the terms that we have, like, well, to summarize, it's how it works in our company, and it's convenient for everybody.

Max Morkovkin 24:14
Okay, good, then let's move to the question from, by the way, this was the question from Claudia. And the question from Anna, how did you manage to reposition localization team within your organization was the challenge.

Anastasia Taymanova 24:28
Of course, that was a challenge. And this is actually what I was speaking about. I think that the core, the core thing was about myself positioning in the company when I realized that I positioned myself as a translation agency by separating myself from other teams, then I somehow realize that it's wrong and thought that maybe I should be more open to other guys. And to be more curious about what they are doing.

Max Morkovkin 25:07
Okay, so it's actually these takeaways that you shared on the last slide. Okay, the question from Kate, a lot of great advice here. As for communication, what would you recommend to do first to minimize over interpreting and therefore conflict in your team, or in the company when working remotely

Anastasia Taymanova 25:34
while speaking specifically of remote work while in our company, we overcame that stress related to remote work quite successfully. And I think that the key was our streamlined, streamlined workflow documented and I think that the key is also about evangelization and education of your colleagues in a steady way. So always remind that you exist, always be patient. Be patient. Be patient about colleagues questions, and just keep methodically educate them about how you work. Just give more information, remind on this conference page. Don't be lazy to manage to arrange meetings, evangelization evangelisation meetings with your colleagues.

Max Morkovkin 26:52
Our last previous event motto was be stronger by sharing. So I think

Anastasia Taymanova 26:59
that's really useful here. That's it? Yeah. Sharing

Max Morkovkin 27:04
the question from Seoul. How important is continuous localization in non software environments?

Anastasia Taymanova 27:13
Um, that depends on which product you're doing. I mean, we do a lot of digital marketing related to. And we work very closely with our customers, we actually do continuous localization for their products. I would say that it's not that we do non software, continuous localization, we actually do software container localizations.

Max Morkovkin 27:48
Yeah, maybe you know how it is a non software? I think that was the question was. But yeah, we can leave it probably for networking. The question from here on Kim, where is the organization chart? Do you think localization should belong for the team to communicate and collaborate most effectively with the other teams?

Anastasia Taymanova 28:13
That's a very good question. And, as I said, in response to the first question, it very much depends on the committee on the company. And on the history history. There's historical aspects of how the company was started, its activity, how it started, grow, and expand the global market. And in our case, it was at the very beginning, it was kind of chaotic process that was really tough. But in my opinion, localization should be a separate department within a company. And it should always raise its awareness. Or at least let people make people make colleagues from other teams aware of, of themselves have to always let them know that we're here where relevant, and this is only possible if you act as a separate localization department being responsible for both product and marketing.

Max Morkovkin 29:41
Let's then take a look on the next question from some case, worry. I'm sorry if I pronounced it wrongly. How did you gain the trust confidence of your stakeholders with all these challenges, especially when it comes to low volume translations, where they asked why not Google Translate instead.

Anastasia Taymanova 30:03
Okay, again, that was not easy. And this is also also the case or it's all about patience and about continuous evangelization, about meetings, especially meetings in person, sometimes even a small talk may lead to a successful relationship with your colleague from other team. I didn't know, I can say that there's a specific trick or specific. There are specific methods of gaining trust. But but in my three points, and in my Carol's I tried to summarize what I did.

Max Morkovkin 30:59
There is also a kind of a question from Anna, you rock Anastasia, how can I call? LinkedIn should be the

Anastasia Taymanova 31:10
right yeah, yeah, that's right, LinkedIn. And I'm going to join networking area right after my presentation, so you can find me there.

Max Morkovkin 31:22
And who knows on the station, maybe you will encourage me to come to work from home next time with with. Okay, good. I think this was the last question unless you guys want to raise your hand and ask question in life. Maybe you would like to type in something? going once going twice. Anyone else? And as they should, I think you can already try to remind all these questions and pick up the best one.

Anastasia Taymanova 32:01
I liked most the question about let me find it. May I help you? Sorry. That was a question about a question from Hee Yong Kim. About where they were in the chat. I think localization should belong. Because this is also my concern nowadays. And I'm thinking of kind of repositioning my team in terms of organization Trent.

Max Morkovkin 32:39
Great. And he on team. The book is yours. Congrats to you, Anastasia. Thank you very much for this. Very nice, very, very open minded presentation.

Anastasia Taymanova 32:52
Thank you guys for having me today.

Max Morkovkin 32:55
Yeah, you're welcome to come and looking forward to see your networking