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After a tumultuous year that impacted the way we live and work, LocWorld attendees turned to Lionbridge for an understanding of what the future will hold for the localization industry. During an informative Q&A session, Lionbridge’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jaime Punishill, offered his take on how localization employees can stay competitive, how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the industry’s future and how companies should approach multilingual product information.
We’ve highlighted the questions posed by attendees and paraphrased Punishill’s vision for the future.
Q: What skills will localization managers need to be successful in the future?
While localization industry managers think about what the future holds for them, one thing is clear: Their skills will have to change, says Punishill.
The Lionbridge CMO observes an opportunity for localization organizations to carry out work in a more connected manner. Many localization organizations currently work like factories. These teams primarily focus on the mechanics of what they do instead of connecting how their contributions impact the business.
For instance, their focus is to get content into more languages, but they do not highlight how their work to enhance the glossary improves the company’s ROI and checkout counter. To advance from a factory-oriented business, the localization manager position will need to evolve from a technical-oriented process into a global business enablement role. This new role will require a different set of skills.
Punishill also points to the evolution of marketing as the canary in the coal mine. Over the last 20 years, marketing has become exceedingly data-driven, and he projects that members of the localization industry will also need to develop an expertise in data management. Marketing has dealt with the web, data, different channels and the debate over quality. These are the same issues being addressed by the localization industry, so the two industries have parallels.
While many localization managers primarily serve in project management roles, Punishill recognizes that it’s going to be necessary for them to evangelize to the rest of the company—all the way up to the C-suite. What’s the message? Localization is much more than a cost function.
“There should be somebody at the table asking, ‘If our goal is 10% expansion in [the] Asia-Pacific [region], then what do we need to do to get there? Do we have the key capabilities?’ The business team is doing that, but they’re not necessarily saying, ‘Great. What’s our localization effort,’” says Punishill.
As Punishill anticipates a localization presence at the C-suite level, he ponders the possibility of a Chief Globalization Officer role. This position would serve as a forcing function to help people within an organization pivot and think of localization as a strategic function.
Q: What did you see during the COVID-19 pandemic that you think might have changed the direction of the future of localization?
Punishill makes the case that everything that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic was already happening prior to the pandemic. This includes mRNA technology research, digital transformation initiatives, the surge of content, the velocity explosion and the shortening of turnaround times for localization projects.
However, prior to the pandemic, companies were responding to these developments in different ways. Punishill points to the quote by fiction author William Gibson as a reflection of the situation. “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”
For instance, some companies put digital transformation firmly in place prior to the pandemic to address challenges like content and velocity increases. Other companies lagged in this important initiative.
Punishill says the digital interface between companies and their customers—resulting from the pandemic—exposed a lot of key issues including language. Companies could no longer rely on brick-and-mortar stores to compensate for inadequate websites in a particular locale. The pandemic was a catalyst that prompted more companies to realize the importance of digital transformation and the full impact of localization.
“You can’t have any of the big, strategic conversations happening at the C-suite at these companies without having language conversations. And yet many of them [weren’t] doing it. They [didn’t] even realize that it’s a key pillar. So that, to me, is the biggest change. Hopefully we’ve just unearthed this really critical enablement point. It’s the industry’s opportunity,” Punishill says.
“We have to stop looking at content quality and start really thinking about content performance.”
– Jaime Punishill, Lionbridge Chief Marketing Officer
Q: What is your view on the quality of product information translation? Is Machine Translation (MT) alone enough to give our customers a good experience?
Punishill says companies will face a variety of challenges when executing multilingual translation for product information. The amount of jargon a company uses, how descriptive the product information is and the use of proprietary names are among the variables that will impact translation difficulty. Challenges will differ by language.
To successfully translate product information, Punishill urges companies to stop emphasizing content quality and to instead focus on content performance. Making this shift will require companies to emphasize user impact.
At the outset, companies should identify why they are localizing content and adding languages. Is it because it will fulfill a regulatory requirement, because the company can sell more products in the new market or sell more products in general? Will they be able to raise their Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer experience, defer more calls to the call center or meet their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which measure a company’s performance?
To assess the suitability of human translation or MT, Punishill advocates running tests. These tests will measure content performance. It requires putting the product information into the target language and target market and taking the target buyer into account. When a company runs a pure human translation, it should measure how the translation performs and how big a lift it is. The results will inform a company how to proceed. Similarly, a company can determine benchmarks around the appropriateness of implementing MT. If only 50 people look at the content, a company may conclude that MT is the best approach in this situation.
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