S03E18: Enterprise Localization Efficiency with Technology

Carrie Fischer

Thank you, thank you for having me. It’s so good to have you back on this podcast Carrie but for people who are listening to you for the first time can you please give them some background and introduce yourself to them. Sure, I’ve been in the localization industry for about 28 years now. I’ve got to see some of the transformation we’ve been through. It’s been a great ride. I started off in the software industry, moved into e-commerce and now at Subway where I’ve been for over five years. And what I love about Subway is I’ve been able to handle every type of content you could probably think of which I’m really grateful for because it’s really given me the ability to experience so many different scenarios and figure out the best localization strategy for Subway. It’s a unique opportunity that I don’t take for granted.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

You are indeed a pioneer and not just in your enterprise but in our industry. I mean a lot of people look up to you because you’re a mentor, you do so much but what keeps you busy these days in the localization world?

 

 

Carrie Fischer

So besides my job of course, I’m on the board of directors for Women in Localization specifically for the global community program. I’m a mentor and just continually presenting at conferences both virtual and now finally in person.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

You are very busy. I know with Women in Loc, we talked about this in the past, mentoring and leadership is a passion of yours but can you give me an update about your work in that space you know outside your regular localization practice?

 

Carrie Fischer

Absolutely. Women in localization I just love. I was a part of that organization when it first started in the Silicon Valley because I was there and we would meet at different companies, board rooms and I’m really excited to see it grow to where we have nine different programs now. And recently we, well I guess it was last year, we had a mentorship program and even though it officially ended last year, I still meet with my mentee because we get so much out of our meetings that we decided to keep it going and we learn from each other. In fact last time that we met just a couple weeks ago, she really opened my eyes to something in the industry that I want to explore further and I really want to point out.

 

So I’m currently writing an article about it. I hope to submit it later this year. So I now like to say that the mentee is now teaching the mentor. It’s fulfilling and I really encourage anyone to be a mentor. You can get back so much more than you give although of course you’re giving with all your experience. And speaking of mentoring, women in localization, we’re going to launch a new mentorship program in the next few months. We’ve engaged a software product company that allows us to match people using software instead of manually using spreadsheets which is what we did last year. And so I’m very excited about this new way of connecting people.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I admire your work. You’re an inspiration. You do a lot of work here. People are seeing you as a leader and we need more of you. So what you’re doing with your mentorship, you’re developing and creating more leaders which is a space that we need a lot more women to be involved in and have their voices heard. Let’s get our attention together and talk about the topic that I’ve invited you to speak about on this podcast today, which revolves around developing and promoting operational efficiency in a localization unit of an enterprise like yours. Please share a few words, Carrie, about what does really efficiency mean to a localization manager.

 

Carrie Fischer

Efficiency is key, especially to those of us who are a one-person team in our organizations. I’m constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency by looking at tools to help me get my work done, get content translated more quickly. I’m getting more and more high volume projects, which is good because it forced me to look into the world of MT, which I had previously avoided at all costs, to be honest. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t get it. I was convinced that it wasn’t going to work for Subway’s content because of the way I was testing it. I didn’t know that I was doing it wrong. Back to your question, efficiency means figuring out what works best for your content types, your products, and your teams. One hat doesn’t fit everyone’s head. It’s important to look at the different offerings and be open to meeting with all different types of vendors that offer different services. It’s very important to be informed so you can make the best decision for your company.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I know that this is a topic that’s very dear to you and you’re passionate about this. You’ve accomplished a lot in this area, as you mentioned earlier, but for a manager who inherits or creates a localization team for the first time of whatever size, in your case, it was small, but you’re making the best out of it, where should they start to implement efficiency in their localization practice?

 

Carrie Fischer

I think if you’re inheriting a team and there’s a localization process already established for me, I know what I did in the past was really, it’s important to get a lay of the land first and not come in with sweeping changes right out of the gate, meeting with the different team members separately to get their take on what’s working and what isn’t. Some people don’t like to speak up in meetings with their peers. Then look at the tools, their pricing, their efficiency, what can be improved, look at the volumes. Meeting with stakeholders, I think, is important too, just to see if they like the service that your team is providing because ultimately we’re all service organizations within our own companies and it’s important to keep our customers happy.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Please share your story about how you started implementing efficiency in your organization, if you will.

 

Carrie Fischer

The first thing I did again was get the lay of the land. Even though there was nobody who did my job before me, localization was still happening, but it was happening randomly with non-approved vendors. It was kind of chaos. I looked at each different department, even though I came into the technology department and was only officially working on their projects, once people at Subway knew I was there, they would send me their projects or at least ask for help. So there was clearly a need to have someone like me just to help centralize and get consistency across the board, not only in terminology, but process.

 

The first thing I did, even when I was in the technology department, was I purchased a TMS because I could see what was coming that eventually more and more content was going to come my way. It already was, unofficially I was helping the guest care team with Subway listens, our survey that our guests take after they experience a purchase in our restaurant. That was probably one of the biggest projects that I ever managed. It was, I think, 36 languages, a ton of content, and it wasn’t even in my department. So I’m glad I put the TMS in place. That was the first thing. Just to get yourself organized and to funnel all of that content in one place so you’re seeing efficiencies across the board, pricing, process, consistency.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

As a service and knowledge-based industry, I mean you’ve been a localization for a long time so you know it inside out. This industry relies on people such as translators, editors, engineers, and so on. How do you improve their performance to meet your efficiency, KPIs, and targets?

 

Carrie Fischer

So I come at everything from a client-side perspective. I like to check in on the health of my contractors and LSPs by talking to them like the valued people that they are. My business can’t run without people regardless of the tools I use. We need people. And I think people naturally want to improve. Most people I know aren’t happy with doing the same thing over and over. How can we keep everyone engaged? We need to challenge them, bring vendors in on discussions, talk to them about areas for improvement within your own company or department. I think people really shine when they’re pushed to their true potential. I think it’s about improving performance to meet efficiency KPIs and targets is all about figuring out what makes the person tick to begin with. What are their goals and what do they want to accomplish? It’s your job as a manager to help them do that.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

There’s this notion that efficiency means doing more with the same amount of resources. Well, to some degree that’s true, but I think efficiency is a lot more than that. I think it’s about doing better than what you’re doing right now.

 

Carrie Fischer

I agree.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Right? And how do you explain that to people who are actually involved in doing this work?

 

Carrie Fischer

That’s a good question. You know how I learned it honestly was through, this is going to sound crazy, but reading self-help books. I know that sounds absolutely nuts, but that’s what really helped me change my attitude about what I was doing, my efficiency. And it was stuff like habits, how to form better habits to make yourself a better person. Because when you’re a better person, you’re going to perform better at work. I know this sounds nuts, but maybe it’s so what I took into account was my health and how that affects my performance at work. If I drink eight ounces of water the first thing in the morning with my vitamin D pills, so you know I can wake up better because I have to get up very early.

 

I’ve noticed that just doing that small little habit every single morning, even before coffee, before food, before anything else, I down that eight ounces of water and that changes my perspective of the day and it gets me going. I drink less caffeine. I don’t need as much coffee as I used to and it improves my efficiency at work. So even recommending books to employees, to peers, to some of my contractors, you know, whatever that might be, believe it or not, that’s made a huge difference in my life. And I think, you know, it can make a big difference in other people’s lives as well. As weird as that sounds.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

You’re healthy, you work better, you perform better. And that doesn’t have to be at work. It’s also your life. You live better. So no, that makes 100% sense. But let me go back to KPIs and targets. We talked about that earlier. Can you describe what kind of targets do you establish in your localization organization to improve efficiency without affecting quality of the localization product?

 

Carrie Fischer

So I take that upon myself to always improve Subway’s efficiency, right? Either through new tools, processes, a new LSP, a new technology vendor, right? So the targets sometimes include doing more at the same amount. I mean, you have to improve processes and tools in, at least for me, in order to get better, right? So it’s, I’m the one that pushes me.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Do you have a plan to say, for example, this week I processed, I don’t know, 12 flyers next week, I will process, I don’t know, 14 flyers with the same teams that I have in place. And do you keep track of how that improvement happens?

 

Carrie Fischer

I don’t care how many projects I get. I could get seven today. I could get 20. I need a process that is able to manage all of that for me. And that’s what’s important, making sure that I can keep up with Subway’s volume and content and still provide a great service to them at the same cost or if not less.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

The global vision and as such efficiency targets across the board are defined by executives, by the top management. Now, how do you take those organizational targets and map them into efficiencies inside your own localization department and you have to define them yourself? Are these targets defined in your organization or they are imposed by executive level management saying, you know, last year this was your budget, this year this is your budget, make things happen?

 

Carrie Fischer

I get to set the budget by talking to all of my stakeholders and saying, what do we think we’re going to do this year? You know, it’s a collaboration, it’s teamwork. And then you get to meet the new people that, you know, are just coming on board or have come on board within the last year, which in the case of technology was just about everyone. So, you know, going through the partnership of creating the budget, knowing what’s coming this next year is important. And then, you know, then you can work together on, you know, if they have issues with, I don’t know, translation quality or, you know, that’s another reason I think it’s, you know, it’s important to gain that trust early on when you first start. And that’s another reason, that’s another way to have people allow them to do their jobs and become more efficient. So we have four pillars at Subway and we all make our goals around those four pillars every single year. One of them is have fun, which I think is great. Yeah, I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever had that at a previous company before. Have fun. Well, okay.

 

But, you know, a lot of it is about empowerment at Subway and I feel very empowered and feel in fact I feel the most empowered that I’ve ever felt at any job because we are all trusted to do our jobs and do the best possible job we can. It probably helps that, you know, we probably all we all eat Subway, we all love Subway. So of course, yeah, we want to make ourselves successful too. And we want to make our franchisees successful. So even though there might be some, you know, new global goal of opening restaurants in a new country, you know, of course that affects me. So okay, now I have to find contractors, LSPs, you know, that maybe specialize in that particular country if it’s not one of the top, you know, 20 or, you know, because we don’t follow trends or e-commerce. You know, the restaurant business is very different from anything that I’ve ever been in before. And even though I don’t play a role in figuring out the next target market to go to because I don’t know the restaurant industry that well, I do play a role in figuring out the best way to get translated content to that target country. And they leave it up to me.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Carrie, let’s go back to the beginning of this conversation. We talked in general about what localization efficiency means to an enterprise or a localization manager. We talked about it earlier, but let’s dig a little bit deeper. I know someone asked me recently, you know, how do I explain things that I do in my department to other people within my organization or outside? So what does localization efficiency mean for someone outside or in that position? Does it mean processing more content in the same amount of time? Or does it mean, for example, processing the same content in a way that doesn’t involve too many eyeballs or, you know, too many hands processing it? I know you mentioned the TMS. That’s some degree of automation, but it comes down to your process and how many steps you have in there. How do you implement efficiencies in something like that?

 

Carrie Fischer

Sometimes it means processing more content in the same amount of time. I mentioned before that I had high volume projects come my way and that’s happening more and more. And so I had to implement, you know, machine translation. And sometimes there’s a human post edit. Sometimes there isn’t. It depends on what type of content, how much time I’m given and the money that we’ve got in the budget. Sometimes it means fewer eyeballs looking at it. Like I mentioned, MT without a post edit. You’ve done it. Knowledge based articles are, I think, a great example. It all depends, I think, on the type of content and how much you’ve got of it. And then putting a strategy around it. Sometimes that means me training some contractors to help me with the project load. And they’ve got ideas on how to be more efficient with Subway’s content. So I think sharing the load with others, which was hard for me, I have to admit. I’m a bit of a control freak. Letting go of some of that, believe it or not, is better for the company and better for you. And it makes for better efficiency across the board.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Carrie, you mentioned about your experience and how you implemented efficiencies in Subway and the great success, if I may say. But is there an efficiency template for localization that you see other enterprises and your own may have implemented? If other localization managers in your position and other enterprises are listening today, has someone documented what are the best practices for implementing localization efficiency?

 

Carrie Fischer

I think so. There’s so many. Well, there’s not a lot of books, actually, that have been written. There’s a few books that have been written. And then we interviewed at Women in Localization. We interviewed about the Globalization Strategy Handbook that was a compilation of, I think, seven people that just got together, documented best practices, processes. And if you’re new to the industry, I mean, that is probably your go-to place to figure out what to do first. Anna Schlegel wrote her book, which she signed for me at our 10-year anniversary five years ago. There are places to go that have templates. There’s even, you know, there’s so much free information out there that, you know, for me, I look at LinkedIn and I see people that have written articles.

 

I read Multilingual Magazine, although I have to say they don’t really show you templates, but they give you insights to how other people do localization, you know, attending free webinars and virtual events. I live in Boise, Idaho, so there’s not a lot going on here. And sometimes, you know, travel isn’t possible. So I’m really grateful to all of the LSPs and technology vendors that put on webinars and give us free content so we can see best practices at other companies and templates of efficiency and put those to work for us. I think that’s one of the great things about the localization industry is we’re all giving our time, talent, and experience to each other. And it’s just become this, I think, amazing ecosystem.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I couldn’t agree with you more. And it’s growing every day with the help of pioneer work from yourself. You mentioned Anna Schlegel. And I know there’s so many great people doing a lot of work. But let’s shift gears here, Kerry. I would like to discuss technology. You mentioned this. I mean, no conversation related to efficiency can be had without talking about technology and its role in improving efficiency. But please describe your own experience and perspective on this. You talked about your TMS. But overall, give us a picture of how technology helped you bring more efficiency.

 

Carrie Fischer

Besides TMS, MT has brought a huge amount of efficiency to Subway in so many different departments. And again, it took time for me to get used to the notion of machine translating Subway’s content. I learned more about it and didn’t have to look up BERT or BLEU scores and what those meant anymore. That helped me accept technology into Subway’s world, AI in general. And I’ve even passed on information from other technology vendors that have these amazing AI products that can help Subway in other various departments. So not necessarily localization, but other departments that gather data. That’s all I can probably say about it. But it’s helped me a great deal. And MT has allowed us to, again, do more content, decent pricing, good enough quality on certain types of content. And it’s really helped, I think, to move our company forward, definitely in the localization space.

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Sultan Ghaznawi

So speaking of technology and MT, you also mentioned the translation centralization with the TMS. Were there other tools that used, for example, a lot of organizations really don’t have a content distribution tool when it comes to translation and things of that nature? Did you look at how, for example, managed projects and apply automation in those areas? How does that all work? In your case, do you also start to automate your billing? Because there has to be a cost center that things move around. Did you see areas where you could actually implement more efficiencies using technology?

 

Carrie Fischer

Absolutely. And we’re going through it right now. So Subway is adopting different software right now to help with billing. That’s one of them. It’s not connected to my TMS because I know the TMS that I use does have billing capability and all that stuff. Our invoicing process in general is quite manual right now, but I’m about to be trained on a new process that will automate that. I generated and I’m also a stakeholder on another initiative around, how can I say this, I don’t want to spill the beans quite yet, but it’s basically an authoring system that will bring us out of the dark ages and really help us create content better, faster, more efficiently, translate a whole lot faster. This is a huge bulk of our content. So again, until it actually happens, and I can do a little case study on it, I don’t want to talk about it too much, but we’re always looking to innovate with technology and make our jobs and lives easier.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Carrie, we have come a long way in our industry. If you look on both supply side and on the client side, in terms of automation to build efficiencies, as you just mentioned, can you talk about what steps in the localization process can benefit from automation? You talked about content breakdown that some of them are low priority content, for example, doesn’t need a lot of manual intervention, but talk about process. Where can process be improved?

 

Carrie Fischer

Identifying type of content and I think breaking it down even by department. So where do I get my content from? What department is it from? Really analyzing and reanalyzing every year or every time there’s maybe a big thing, a big project coming down the pipe, figuring out what parts can be used for automation, what parts can’t. Gosh, at another company, we really focused on the process. This is before we had a TMS, right? And it was all people and we were still getting more and more projects and we had to do it with the same amount of people. We really broke everything down into steps that people could manage or that had to be sent somewhere else. Maybe it was a QA team and I hate to say it, but you know, swim lanes really came into play. Visio was the tool to use at that point, but I have to say it was visual and that’s why they called it Visio to really bring visibility into every single step in every localization process for every type of project in every single department.

 

I think that’s the only way that you can go, why does it have to go here? Maybe the best thing is for it to go here. That may seem like a lot of work upfront, but in my opinion, that’s in order to gain efficiency, you need to have visibility into every single step in every single process. And that’s where you learn where to automate and how to become more efficient.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Carrie, when people think about localization, they think language. I mean, language is important. Translation is a major component of localization. There are many other areas though that localization covers. Now how can technology benefit those areas in terms of efficiency?

 

Carrie Fischer

I think how content is created is the first place we all need to look. If there aren’t efficiencies in how content is created, we’re all going to do it differently. If you’re in a company that produces a lot of content and every department is doing it differently, and we’re not gaining any efficiencies, that can lead, I think, to major problems. So in my opinion, part of the localization process is having tools to help us create content for reuse that other departments can use. So I think the right content creation tool can make all the difference in the world. It’s one of my passions and something that I noticed right away at Subway. Quite siloed. Everybody has their own way of creating content, their own CMS, which in some cases isn’t really a CMS. It’s just a place to store documents.

But I think that’s honestly the key to a company’s efficiency and gaining efficiencies is reuse of content. Because quite frankly, for example, our operations manual is kind of the basis. It’s the basis for everything we do at Subway. Its success depends, the restaurant’s success depends on how well that ops manual is written. Because then we take that ops content and put it in e-learning. We put it in job aids. We want to be saying the same thing over and over. Consistency, consistency. And having a content creation tool that helps you do that and helps move chunks of content around but the same paragraph to a different type of content. You’ve saved on creating the content in English or whatever the source language is. And then you’ve saved a ton of money on translation and localization. So it’s really important to see how your company is creating content in the first place. And if you have the influence to centralize that and get it in one place, I think that would save company time and money.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s go back to the process, Carrie. Every organization has a different localization process because they are unique. Now how can you bring efficiency in the overall process? For example, how do you revisit your production process to identify ways to do things differently to improve speed, quality, or cost, whichever your priority is?

 

Carrie Fischer

Like I said, I think bringing efficiency to the overall process means digging deep into every single step that your organization does or the localization department handles. The only way is to, I think, make it visible. And how often do we revisit the production process? Honestly, every single time we do it because there’s always something wrong and there’s always some pain point. And I think maybe that’s the place to focus on the pain points. What isn’t working? Well, every time we send content to be reviewed in this country, they take two months to do it before we can implement the changes back into English. And by then, the whole manual has changed or the whole content type has changed. It’s really important to highlight the pain points and focus on those first.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Can you please talk, Carrie, about the role of localization vendors because they form a major part of this value chain. When it comes to promoting and building efficiency in enterprise localization efforts like yours, what can they do to make things better and more efficient for you?

 

Carrie Fischer

I bring them in as much as possible. I really like partnering with LSPs that think outside the box, that are focused not only on themselves, you know, everyone has to look at the bottom line. But in order to gain efficiencies within the client side, honestly, the vendors have already figured this out because they have the benefit of working with so many different client side companies. You can go across every single scenario you could possibly think of and bringing them into your, maybe not decision making process, but bringing them into especially the problem areas and asking for advice on how they might solve it. And that includes companies that you don’t even work with. I find, you know, I try and if somebody asks for a meeting with me who’s not a vendor partner, I will usually meet with them because you never know when there’s going to be some tidbit of information or some special problem solver that comes from a company that you’re not working with, you know, it might show up in the perfect time. So it’s important, I think, to bring vendor partners in to help you solve your issues because they’ve seen it. They’ve probably seen it before and can help you at least come up with a scenario of solutions.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Circling back to technology, Carrie, besides things such as translation memory, machine translation, project management, automation, and so on, there are so many new areas of automation using AI and so forth. Do you foresee any specific localization business functions that can benefit from this type of automation and improve efficiency? Just to make it more clear, for example, do you see efficiencies in vendor management? For example, payment processing or quality reconciliation issues related to errors and so forth, do you see automation playing a role there in terms of efficiency?

 

Carrie Fischer

I do. And, you know, I’m not there yet. I’ve talked about this many times. I feel like, you know, I’m the toddler. I’m the infant when it comes to how I implement technology, but for Subway’s benefit. I was at Global Sake recently. I was presenting, right? There was another presenter from NetApp and Cisco, quite frankly, their implementation of technology far surpasses anything that I will probably ever get to at Subway. But it’s absolutely amazing how they use AI to fix AI. I wish I could remember the name of their product, but Self-Healing. Was that it? I think it was called Content Self-Healing. And so if there’s a problem and they see it, even in the internationalization process, they have a method of fixing it automatically. They don’t need a person to go through and go, oh, here’s where we have that hard-coded string or, you know, whatever internationalization issue is there. They use technology to find it, fix it, heal it, and send it on its merry way into the next step of the process. So there’s so many, so many new ways, I think, for technology to play a part in efficiency that any company could benefit from. I’ll be completely honest, I’m not there yet. And I don’t think my company is quite there yet. But we are taking steps to improve efficiency, so maybe we could get to this point at some point.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

It’s good to know that you have identified areas beyond the traditional efficiency opportunities that you think can improve your business, not just localization, but tie it up into other business objectives and overall the company’s performance gets better, right?

 

Carrie Fischer

Absolutely, yeah. Build things more quickly.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And so that makes the role of localization more prominent within an enterprise compared to before where it was obscured.

 

Carrie Fischer

It’s true. It’s very true. The only level person I haven’t met at Subway is the CEO himself. But localization becomes very prominent, not only because, you know, it’s seen as a cost center. No, it’s really seen as a partner in getting franchisees what they need to run their businesses better.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Some people are concerned, Carrie, that efficiency and automation can cannibalize human productivity in general. I mean, we see this not just in our industry, it’s everywhere. Like people say, you know, if you have the self-checkouts in grocery stores, the cashiers are no longer needed. Now, we’re talking about automation and efficiency here. I think localization also fair to say prone to this argument. What do you say to that?

 

Carrie Fischer

It’s a good question, Sultan. From the grocery standpoint, that’s maybe, right? I don’t see that happening in a lot of areas. And I remember hearing about this years ago. Companies, and we won’t mention names, having self-checkout stores. And granted, I don’t live in a big city. I live in Boise, Idaho. I don’t ever see that happening, to be honest. So what does that mean for the localization industry? And when it comes down to it, there’s people innovating. And maybe there’s a shift in where people are working and the type of work that they’re doing. There will always be content that requires a human translation, in my opinion. I don’t care how good the machines get. Creative content, as we all know, isn’t exactly, doesn’t work great with machine translation. At least it hasn’t for me. I do know companies that use it for marketing. I don’t think we ever would. The slang and idioms that we use in our advertising kind of proves that. I don’t know. To circle back, we will always need people.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

In our industry on the supply side, it’s largely believed that the client portal idea where translation companies would just have a portal, automated thing, create an ATM type of machine for localization where customers would not see a project manager or hear them just upload a file and download a file. I think that has largely failed because we are a service-based, people-based industry where people need to talk to people. That type of automation. I mean, yeah, we can automate certain things such as low priority content for machine translation. But all in all, there’s still fear that my job will be different. It doesn’t mean that it will go away. It might be different to some degree. You might not be writing that content or translating it, but you might be supervising its creation or its translation. Now, do you see that that argument is fair, that efficiency will result in damage to certain areas or people?

 

Carrie Fischer

Maybe. I think that probably holds true with localization as well. There are certain instances where automation is just going to work better and more efficient and still get the guest satisfaction that we’re all looking for.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let me ask you about moving forward. What type of efficiency gains and tools for such gains do you see becoming available to our industry and enterprise localization teams? Do you have a wish list of things that you could automate? You mentioned content creation. There could be automation playing a role in that.

 

Carrie Fischer

There is. Content creation and having efficiencies even through AI, one of the biggest problems that we have, like I mentioned, is getting feedback on, let’s say, a task, an operational task. Maybe something, a new task has been put in the Ops manual. We need to run it by France, Japan, and China. They don’t understand what’s being asked because it’s in English. Putting in a quick and dirty AI translation so at least they get the gist and can comment saying, oh no, we have our ovens at 350, not 340, whatever. To have that efficiency in place would make our jobs a lot easier and see efficiencies there. There are definitely improvements that AI can help with. That’s how I would see it in content creation. At least those are the challenges that we’re seeing today and that we’re hoping to fix.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Interesting. Well, on that note, let me just add one wish that I have for creating efficiency gains. I think it would be really nice if we could create videos from text to explain things. Maybe that’s something in the future we can have. We have it in English. It’s kind of like the IKEA way of doing things, but perhaps we could benefit. Maybe multilingual content can benefit from that as well.

 

Carrie Fischer

For sure. I know there are companies that do that. Boy, wouldn’t it be nice if a franchisee could just download a video on how to set up her oven instead of going to this part of the manual, going down here and reading about it. A visual that could be manifested in that operations manual would make the franchisees more efficient.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Certainly, because at the end of the day, it’s about doing things better, not necessarily faster. Right? That’s right.

 

Carrie Fischer

That’s right.

Sultan Ghaznawi

Carrie, we’re reaching the end of this conversation. There’s so much more to cover, but I would like to ask your thoughts and opinions for the industry and particularly executives on the supply side and localization managers and enterprises like yourself. What would you like them to learn about efficiency and improve their localization practice?

 

Carrie Fischer

I think it’s all about listening to the clients. Instead of maybe going off creating something that you think is amazing and you need to show the world and push to your clients, it may not be something that they need. That’s why I think it’s really important to have that collaboration between vendor partner and client to understand what the needs are because most likely, five other clients are having the same issue and that’s what the tool creation, I think, should be about and how vendor partners can help solve client issues. Honestly, I think that’s what needs to be thought about from the executives on the supply side and know that it’s sometimes not all about the next best tool. It’s about, in the end, customer service and making sure you’ve got the right people servicing clients. Every so often, you come across someone that probably shouldn’t be in their role. I think it’s going back to the people. It’s about having the right people in your organization to make you more efficient and ultimately to make your customers happy.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

With that, we bring this episode of the podcast to the end. I have to say, Carrie, you shared a lot of important thoughts and ideas here that will benefit colleagues on both the supply and client side of localization. I can’t thank you enough for being so candid and open about your perspective. As always, I say, even if we were able to help one colleague in the industry, the efforts behind this podcast has paid off for me. Let me thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule and to have this conversation with me today. I look forward to speaking with you soon.

 

Carrie Fischer

Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Efficiency is a topic that our industry has been passionately debating about for years. With the introduction of translation memory, it has always been about improving the speed of translation. However, I think efficiency is not just about how fast we produce text output in another language. I think efficiency is also about how we can do better and Carrie agreed with me that better means many things to many people. Automation has partially solved the speed problem, but we still have a long way to go to solve problems related to developing processes where manual work is involved, ensuring consistency and repeatability where doing that work becomes second nature and using technology for efficiency in other parts of the localization practice, such as vendor management, sales, quality control, billing and more.

 

There are still challenges related to passing work from localization teams to vendors. And while some tools have tried to address that, it is still not very efficient. Integration between tools can solve such challenges and bring you about efficiency. At the end, efficiency should be about making the job of a localization manager within an enterprise easier so they can manage their KPIs better.

 

That brings us to the end of this episode. I’m glad we were able to cover a topic that is constantly discussed, yet we are still learning more about it. I hope you were able to learn at least one thing to apply to your localization practice and make your life easier. Make sure to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk Podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favorite platform and give us a 5-star review.

 

Until next time!

 

Outro

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