S05E06: Applying Localization Audit Insights for Enhanced Enterprise Strategies

Intro

Hello and welcome to the Translation Company Talk, a weekly podcast show focusing on translation services and the language industry. The Translation Company Talk covers topics of interest for professionals engaged in the business of translation, localization, transcription, interpreting, and language technology. The Translation Company Talk is sponsored by Hybrid Lynx. Your host is Sultan Ghaznawi with today’s episode.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Translation Company Talk podcast. Today we are going to hear from Teresa Toronjo from Malt about how you can take the results of a localization audit and apply them to your practice inside an enterprise. This is the second part of my conversation with her. Last year she discussed how to implement an enterprise localization audit. If you haven’t listened to that conversation, feel free to look it up on this podcast. It is worth a listen.

 

Teresa is a localization manager with more than 11 years of experience working with languages and localization. She has a wide scope of experience in all roles, including translator, localization specialist for a specific market, localization project manager, and localization lead for Europe and the Middle East. Over the years, she has worked in setups with in-house linguists, LSPs, and freelancers, and with flows that went from very mature, with more than 35 languages, to new flows with only 5 languages.

 

She has touched on many types of content, but always with a focus on software as a service, first with Klook and then with Peakon and Workday. She loves languages and cultures and has lived in the United States, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, and the Netherlands, though she is originally from Seville in Spain.

 

Welcome back to the Translation Company Talk podcast, Teresa.

 

Teresa Toronjo

Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be back.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

It is so good to have you back. For the interest of people who haven’t heard your first interview, can you please introduce yourself to colleagues listening to you for the first time?

 

Teresa Toronjo

Yes, absolutely. Not a lot has changed since the last time we talked. So, I’m going to repeat myself a bit. I’m originally from Spain and have lived in many countries, but I’m joining this interview from The Hague in the Netherlands. I love languages, cultures, and technology. So, when I started in the localization industry, I was like, yes, this is where I want to stay. I have worked in many positions within the localization industry, but now for a year, I am a one-person show creating the strategy for the product localization at Malt.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

It was not too long ago when we spoke on this Podcast, and you talked in a lot of detail about everything that you do at Malt. You just mentioned that. But please give us an update on what you have been up to lately. What’s been going on in your world?

 

Teresa Toronjo

I will tell you what probably everyone else is also telling you or what everyone else is doing. I am, of course, diving into the world of AI and machine translation. So, we did have a translation tool, but it was not a TMS. So, we integrated a TMS in January and set it up to leverage AI-powered machine translation. Together with that, I’m also working more officially with the other departments. I remember I told you I was officially in charge of product, but of course, I was also working with other types of content.

 

Now it’s becoming slowly more official and I’m helping them reduce the manual work that they do. So increased automation. Of course, the TMS is going to help a lot with that as well. Something that I love is that there is this very cool initiative at Malt that once a year, they have an internal tech conference. I joined their tech conference in November last year, and I spoke about internationalization. Now I’m working very closely with the developers on internationalization at Malt. So that’s what I’m doing now.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

You have your plate full, and it sounds like you’re not just doing localization, but you’re also doing evangelization, because you are educating people who are working in the upstream processes to prepare content for localization.

 

Teresa Toronjo

Definitely. And I think that it is such an important part of our job, you know, to take the stand and to take the floor and to show what we can offer.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

From your vantage point, Teresa, how does the enterprise localization landscape look like today?

 

Teresa Toronjo

It’s a complex and challenging situation, I think. It’s, of course, I’m not going to say anything new. It is a difficult moment for companies. I think especially in the tech sector; it can be a bit scary. There are layoffs. Technology, of course, is helping or not, depending on what side you’re on. Machine translation, artificial intelligence, and it seems like people are very worried about, oh, my God, what is going to happen in their industry. Are some of the jobs going to become obsolete? I personally find it very interesting, all these challenges and changes that are happening.

 

From my point of view, it is more than changing the way in which we work. It’s changing the way in which we think and the way in which we plan. Just to give you an example where maybe my budget, I had 100 euros, and I could translate 300 words. It doesn’t mean that in the future I will only have 50 euros. Maybe it means that with those 100 euros, I will be able to translate 300 words from product and 300 from marketing. Or maybe I will be able to buy a tool that will allow me to automate and increase the volume or maybe the quality.

 

So, what I see is, yes, it’s a bit scary. People are, of course, losing their jobs and are having to rethink what they do. But on the other hand, we are being challenged to rethink how we work, and I think that is a good thing.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

With that, I would like to maybe dive in through the details of all of that as we continue this conversation. I have invited you to speak about a topic which is basically the second part of our conversation on localization audit. Last time you mentioned what an enterprise should be doing in terms of an audit to figure out where they are with localization.

 

Today I want you to shed some light on how you can take the results of such an audit and implement it in your organization. That’s a monumental task. Let’s recap first. What is an enterprise localization audit and why is it important?

 

Teresa Toronjo

As we mentioned during our previous conversation, you will hear the word audit a lot in connection with money. But specifically, a localization audit is that and then some more. So, it’s getting the lay of the land and getting a 360 view of everything that is being done in your company in terms of localization.

 

So, a localization audit is ultimately a tool to measure at what stage the localization effort is at your company. It helps you understand what has already been done, what is being done today, and what could be done in the future. Most importantly, or at least most importantly for me, because I’m also the strategy person at Malt for localization, it is a tool to align the effort in terms of localization with the direction and the priorities of your company.

 

So, another thing that we mentioned, and I think maybe it would be good to include in our recap, is what a localization audit should include. Some of the things that we mentioned were budget and expenses and any data available connected to return on investment, the number of languages you work with, the number of markets in which you operate, the volume of the content you work with, and how that has changed over time, the types of content you work with officially, like in my case, product, and then unofficially, what other teams are you working with at the end of the day?

 

The localization process and the workflows. So, with that particular attention to automation, what is automation and what is being done manually, quality assurance, tooling, stakeholder, communication and visibility. And there I also mean evangelization of localization and the current localization roadmap that you have in your company and how it is connected to the company objectives, like the general objectives for the entire company. I think that’s a pretty condensed summary of what we mentioned last time.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

With that introduction about the audit out of the way, the localization audit that we’ve now put out of the way. Let’s dive into how we can take the learnings from the audit and apply that to the organization, to the processes, to the overall structure of what we are doing or what the organization is trying to accomplish. Teresa, please talk about how do you interpret the results from your audit before you implement them?

 

Teresa Toronjo

Yes, we briefly touched on this during our previous talk. Just as a reminder, I ended up with a very long report and this report included all the things that had been done and were working, all the things, all the things that were being done and what was not working, and all the things that were not being done. I had to get on my Google sheet with all the data that I could find and all the data that I ideally would want to have.

 

Now that I have mentioned that, or refreshed that, going back to your questions, once you have that audit, that list that can be in different formats, whatever works for you. Then you look at your company’s OKR’s or common goals or whatever system they use to take the company in the right direction, and you look at what aspects of your audit align with your objectives and which ones do not. You will have some items that don’t align at all. You should write down why they will not be prioritized. You will then have some items that partially align and there you will write down how they align and how they don’t and what would be the potential impact and effort.

 

Here, note that when I say effort, I mean the investment. It would be in terms of money, time and resources. So, what would be the investment of prioritizing these items that are partially aligned with the general or common company objectives? You will have some items that align, if not fully, almost fully with the company objectives. Again, you will write down how they align and what would be the potential impact and effort of prioritizing those items.

 

By the end of this process, you should end up with a shorter list of items to consider. You should be able to prioritize them by using the impact and the effort that you have noted down for each of them.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s talk about the ownership of the results. Who’s in charge of going through those results? Teresa, is it in the hands of the localization team or decision makers at the enterprise management? Or does this mean that it must be tackled at a level above within the management?

 

Teresa Toronjo

Before I dive into the answer, spoiler alert, the localization expert or team or localization team should be making these informed decisions. We were talking about evangelization of localization before. It is very important that, as localization experts, we go through these results and only when they have been processed in a way that it’s understandable for other stakeholders, they are then presented to other teams, or within the same team but maybe to other experts.

 

Let’s remind ourselves that, like I said, we’re the experts in what we do. Of course, you want to open the discussion, you want to open the debate, but ultimately, you know what the audit is saying, you know where the company wants to go, and you should be the one deciding as a localization specialist what actions will be most impactful with the budget that you have.

 

So, the audit, the results of the audit, and how you connect them to the objectives of your company in an actionable way, is what is going to shift the localization team or the localization function from a deliverable and a passive narrative to a proactive and strategy narrative.

 

So, what I’m trying to say here is to take up the responsibility. Let’s remind ourselves that localization is a growth enabler and that as such, we should feel comfortable making these choices and making these decisions and asking for our place at the table. This is true for any expertise, you know, you’re the expert and that comes with certain responsibilities. So, the localization team and yes, fight for that, I would say.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

You and I talked about a formal structure for this audit, Teresa. But what about a formal structure for the results so you can map them to the corporate KPIs that you have? How do you justify that, for example, increasing the number of words for X market will increase our sales output across the organization to Y level. Let me hear your thoughts on that.

 

Teresa Toronjo

It’s a tricky one. Is it okay if I use an example for this one?

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Please do.

 

Teresa Toronjo

Yes, I think it can be more useful for people listening. Let’s say that one of the results of your audit shows that the process that you use to open a new market is inefficient for several reasons. Maybe one is that it lacks ownership. Another one is that it is a very manual process. Another one is that the process is incomplete. And number four, which is the one we’re going to focus on, you have identified that the product testing is very expensive and time-consuming. We will go into detail about this further on during my answer.

 

Let’s say that this is what the audit is telling us. Now you look at your company objectives. This is scenario number one. You look at your company objectives and it turns out that growth is not one of the main objectives for the year and opening new markets is not planned for the following 12 months. So, would you say this is a priority for you and or the company? Probably not. We will archive it later and explain why. For example, growth is not a priority for the next 12 months. We’re not going to open any countries for the next month. So that when you reread your audit in 12 months, in 16 months, whenever, you know why you made that decision.

 

Now, let’s say scenario two, you have these results from your audit. Now you look at your company’s objectives and growth is indeed one of the three main objectives for the year. You will be opening three new markets in the next 12 months. It’s planned, like, I don’t know, Q1 this market, Q3 this market, Q4 this other market. Of course, when you ask yourself, would this be a priority for me and the company, then the answer is obviously yes.

 

So, if the answer is yes, instead of archiving this issue, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to look at the data that we have. Like we were saying before, let’s take one specific example, which was the testing of the product before it goes live is an expensive time. For example, I have the following data. Testing takes four full days and checking and implementing the changes that have been identified during the testing takes up to five weeks. It is expensive because it’s done maybe in person at one of the locations of the company. So, you must calculate the total expenses of the trips, the hotels, and the salary of these employees who are dedicating their time, instead of doing other tasks, to testing the product, which is not their main task.

 

Then you also see that the testing guidelines are not clear and include not only high-impact flows, but also low-impact flows. Here you could calculate, for example, how many flows are high priority, how many are medium and how many are low priority or impact, and how much time you’re spending on each of these flows. Then you also see that participants don’t have a good idea of the errors that need to be fixed, what are bugs that need to be logged for the engineers and what are suggestions.

 

So, the product is supposed to work like that and it’s not an error. It’s not a bug. It’s just a suggestion. You would like it to work differently. Here you could measure, for example, how many logged issues were made for each category and how long it takes you to sort through them and put them in the right category. So now you can think about your objectives, which is going back to your question. How do you say, well, I’m going to justify this as X percent improvement of this or that.

 

So now that you have your objectives and your KPIs, for example, you can say you will reduce, this could be your KPI, you will reduce the testing time by X percent, and you will reduce the expenses by X percent. Now we connect the KPI to the initiative. That is your objective. How do you reduce the cost? For example, it could be that the testing is going to be done online, instead of in person, or we’re going to reduce the testing time by focusing only on high and medium impact flows or priority flows. We’re not going to dedicate time to flows that are low visibility or low impact.

 

So, at the end, you end up with something like this and this is like the wrap up of my example. You have gone from the result of your audit. You have connected it to the company objectives. You have then identified all the data that you need to make the right decisions and identify the KPI and the initiative. At the end, you end up with something like this. You have the initiative, do the product testing online or do the testing only for high and medium impact flows and features.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

One suggestion would be to even automate it. Like now we have generative AI, right?

 

Teresa Toronjo

Exactly. Or automate it or even say we don’t test. We run it through a tool and then we see what comes up. The KPI impacted is reduce the testing expenses by X percent. And the objective is efficient growth. So, you go objective, KPI, initiative. Or the other way around initiative, KPI, objective.

 

In this case, I’m focusing on the money, but I could be focusing on the time, or I could be focusing on the quality. I could say how many issues did I identify? How do I change my process so that in the testing, less issues are identified because the quality of my product is better?

 

So, depending on the objective, the KPI and the initiative will change. The most important thing is the objective because it’s what connects you to the company objective at a bigger level. It gives you directions because at the end of the day, there are, I think you were saying before, you have your plate full because there are so many things. I think if you ask anyone in the industry, in the localization industry, they will tell you that there are a million things that we could be doing every day.

 

The important thing is identifying what things you want to do and are necessary for you and your company and what things you have to say no to and why not, why you are not doing this.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Teresa, let’s say that the audit results were very compelling and impressive, allowing you to determine where the organization is now with regards to localization and giving you a starting point for where you want to be. You were just talking about the objectives. What is the first step in translating these results into tangible and actionable objectives?

 

Teresa Toronjo

Yes. And I think here we are going to focus on the last part of my previous answer. So, like how the initiatives, KPI, and objectives are connected. As I just mentioned, the first step is to see if the result is indeed aligned with the objective and main priority of the company. Like you were saying whether it’s the right direction. If they are, then you dissect the data or even gather more data that you maybe didn’t have during the audit to have a better clearer picture.

 

Then you make choices. We were talking about this just now. You make choices and you cannot apply 100 initiatives to improve one KPI. You cannot undertake 100 initiatives to address one goal, because you need to be realistic, and you need to be efficient. Also, you normally have more than one KPI and more than one objective to tackle. So, making choices and knowing what not to do is as important as what you’re doing.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s talk about change. It’s something that always requires a catalyst. In this case, the business objectives for increased growth normally triggers the audit that presents the case for the change. Can you tell me who decides on the budget, the time, the material or resources needed to implement these changes?

 

Teresa Toronjo

I feel this depends on the maturity of your department and the teams that are involved. I would touch on each element. You mentioned budget, time, materials, tools and resources. I would start with budget normally because that’s like the main concern for people is money. So normally you will have a yearly budget for localization and normally it includes translations and quality, which also includes testing and tooling, like the main categories. es.

 

Sometimes you can be part of the budget allocation discussion. Sometimes you’re not part of that decision and the budget is just communicated to you. This is the money that you have and deal with it. It is part of our job as localization expert to work with the budget that we have and make the best decisions based on, again, the results of our audit and the direction in which the company wants to go.

 

It doesn’t matter how much you care about one specific aspect of the audit, if that is not relevant for the company or where the company wants to go, you will have to deprioritize it and you cannot dedicate the budget to what you think or what you find in things, but you have to dedicate it to where you know that it’s going to be needed. This will, of course, limit the decisions that you can make and the initiatives that you can apply.

 

Like in our previous example, that doesn’t mean that you must sometimes give up on initiatives. You were, of course, saying you could automate the testing, for example, in our previous example. So maybe we save money by automating the testing and that money that we save, we can use it for something else, better tooling, a new plugin, more quality assurance. That’s in terms of budget.

 

Now I would pass to time. My advice for time is to first create your roadmap by first identifying which initiative or which objectives must happen by a specific date. So, for example, the opening of a specific market must happen by January 2025, because there will be a marketing campaign that will happen at the same time, plus promotional events, etc. So that in your calendar is, you know, you cannot move that. That must happen. But there will be other objectives, and other initiatives that you can move around.

 

So, first put the ones that have a tight deadline and then move the other ones around, I would say. So, we cover budget and time. I think the other ones were materials, tools, and resources. I would say materials and tools next because it’s only connected to the budget. Here there is this Spanish expression. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but there is a Spanish expression that says at the end, that the collar costs more than the dog. I like that expression a lot and I will explain why. I want to explain why I like it so much is because no matter the financial situation of the company I work for, I personally always operate under the assumption that we are trying to reduce costs and increase efficiency. This means that every tool I use; I evaluate first to make sure that the collar does not end up costing more than the dog.

 

Let’s use the same example that we have been using up until now. The product testing can happen online, you can automate it, but automating the product testing is going to cost you 150, and having nine people at the office for four days is going to cost you 100. So, okay, maybe automating it or the tool that could automate the testing in this case specifically, is not worth it because it’s going to end up costing you more than having the people physically at the office for the four days.

 

Then you think, okay, yes, it cost me 150, but I paid 150 and I use it on the three launches, the one we have in Q1, the one we have in Q3, and the one we have in Q4. So, in the end, although it costs 150 instead of 100, I am eventually saving 150 because taking nine people for four days would be 300 and the tool is 150. So ultimately comparing the two, the tool or the technology tool that allows me to automate it, is going to be better for me. So, I hope that covers the materials and the tools.

 

I left resources for last because it’s the tricky one. How do you convince your team that you need an engineer to spend three full days working on a project with you, or how do you convince someone from a product that doing translations for the marketing team, with the budget that you had for the product translations can benefit you, your team or the company? So, I would say here, there are like two scenarios. Scenario number one is you can do it on your own. Then there is no problem.

 

The important thing is to be realistic and don’t bite off more than you can chew and say, well, I can do it and then you have no life, and you end up doing a lot of things on your own. So, if you can do it on your own, that doesn’t mean that you should not be critical of what you’re taking on. You are your own resource. So, use yourself and your time also mindfully. And the difficult part, I think, or the most difficult part is when you need resources from other departments, or you need to use your resources to support another department. Here, what you need is data.

 

So, I could give you an example. So, imagine that your customer support team receive tickets from users, about content that is not clear enough about how to add their bank details to get paid for the services that they provide. It turns out that the content is not clear because it contains complex HTML. The developers decided to hard code it. So, every time the customer care team needs to change the content, they must open a ticket to the developers, telling them how they want the content to be changed.

 

Then the developers, because they have a pile of work that is humongous, take about three to four weeks to make these changes, from the day the client made the complaint until the day it is changed in the system, maybe a month went by. Then you say, okay, I know that customer care receives eight tickets per month related to this issue and that addressing those tickets takes them about X hours every month. They open several tickets to developers every month and it takes the developers around X hours of work to make the changes.

 

You know, if the customer care team had access to that content, so if it were not hard-coded, but it was accessible to them through, for example, a TMS, we would reduce the tickets by X percent and we would reduce the time spent both by the customer care team and the engineers. You also know that you will provide a better experience for the user, because the change would happen almost immediately, maybe in three days instead of three to four weeks. After all, you must wait for the developer.

 

So, when you have this kind of data, the conversation with your manager or with the manager of the engineering team is very difficult because you’re not telling them, I want you to spend three days working on my project because it’s important to me. You’re telling them, I want you to spend three days working on my project because it’s going to save you three days a month for the rest of the year and it’s going to save the other team three days a month, for the rest of the year and it’s going to increase their customer satisfaction. So, it’s a different conversation.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Speaking of data, let me zoom in on this specifically. In the context of localization, let’s talk about how incumbent localization teams, the teams that have been traditionally working over the years in an enterprise, things have worked very well. How can they reevaluate their effectiveness and how do they want to modernize themselves or align themselves better with their organizational objectives? So, how would they interpret that data from the audit and make changes?

 

Teresa Toronjo

I like this question because it is the most common situation. You normally have an already working team and must think about what is coming next. Making an audit is a fantastic first step to reevaluating your situation and the situation of your team. Probably the most challenging part is once the audit is in progress, once you’re conducting it, and once it is completed, it is important, of course, to keep a critical and open mind.

 

The reason why I’m saying this is because it’s very easy to start at a new company or to be an external contributor and evaluate it with no qualms, just very harshly. It is a different matter entirely to look at what you are doing and the decisions that you have made and be honest about it. I’m not saying be honest about it because bad. No, in my experience localization teams tend to be too humble. So, when I say honest, I don’t mean only to be realistic, of course, about what is not working or is working, but it’s not aligned with a company, but also taking credit for the things that you’re doing great and being vocal about it. You know, we did this audit just so that, as a company, we are “acing” this and that, as well as here and we change it. And here, we should start doing this.

 

Once they have the results, going back to your question, I personally find it to be a more fun process for these teams, because they already have objectives, they already have KPIs, and presumably, they have a lot of data. So, they would be assessing from the real needs highlighted from the audit and the company’s global objectives, which objectives and KPIs that they have correctly are aligned, and which ones are not.

 

Some will align perfectly and can be kept as they are. Some will align lightly, and they will need to be adjusted. Some will not be aligned at all and will need to be dropped or deprioritized. Some of them, as we mentioned before, maybe nobody thought about them before, or it was never a priority before, and they will need a full new KPI or KPIs and a full new set of initiatives, that will have to be created for this specific case.

 

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Sultan Ghaznawi

An audit is just a review of how things are now. So, basically take a picture or snapshot of how things are working or not, as you just mentioned, but it needs to be done regularly to make sure that the organization is on track. Now, Teresa, how often would you recommend the audit should be performed and its results apply to the organization?

 

Teresa Toronjo

I would say it depends on the type of company. For big corporations, one would expect to have a more long-term strategy that allows for more long-term objectives and KPIs for all departments, I guess, including the localization team. Startups might change strategy and priorities more frequently. Anyone who has worked with, or for, or in a startup will tell you it is like a rollercoaster. You need to be more flexible in your approach, also for other teams, not only localization.

 

Because I don’t want to say, you know, it depends and not actually give an answer, my advice would be for the companies with the long-term strategy, a review of the audit once a year should be enough. But ideally, this should go hand in hand with the yearly review of the finished year. So, say it’s the end of 2024, we have a time machine, it’s November, December 2024. You take your audit, you review it, but you also connect it to your yearly review, your yearly performance review for the team and for yourself as an individual.

 

You also connect it at the same time with the roadmap and the planning that you’re going to do for 2025. And these three things should always be connected and should always be working as one. This is for like companies with long-term strategies, so corporate companies. For companies with more changing environments, so maybe a startup or K-Lab, depending on where they are, I would advise a review in H1 and a review in H2.

 

If your company has a half-year review schedule, some companies have only the end-of-year review, but some companies have the half-year review, then I would say the audit review while you’re doing your half-year performance review. And again, at the end of the year, together with the roadmap for 2025 and with the yearly performance review of your team.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How would you handle data and reports generated by an outsourced audit in case you engage an outside party to perform the audit for you? How do you ensure they capture the data that is critical to your organization?

 

Teresa Toronjo

That’s a good question. I have never been in a position where I had to use the data from an outsourced audit. I would say the approach to how to handle the data would not change. I find what is important is that you hire a company that can do a 360 audit so that you make sure that you select a company that can do all the aspects of your localization strategy, and not only some of them, like quality or tooling but everything that we mentioned in the list at the beginning. I guess what’s more than you select the company, is how you as a company treat the supplier. So, the person that is supporting you with the audit.

 

For me, it is important to share the most up-to-date information about your company goals and strategy, of course under a confidentiality agreement, so they can highlight which aspects of the audit might be most relevant to you. In essence what I’m trying to say is treat them like they are part of your company, like they are colleagues. Don’t treat them like people who come from the outside and they’re coming to judge you but treat them like people who have your best interests at heart, that are coming in to help you and to support you and give them all the information and all the material that they need.

 

Ideally, a company not only provides the audit so a good audit report but is also available to support you after the audit is concluded on how you connect it with your objectives and with the KPI. That would be like a dream.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Let’s shift gears, Teresa, and talk about how we track the implementation of audit findings. Who is responsible to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks, and we know that often happens?

 

Teresa Toronjo

Well, some things will inevitably fall through the cracks. It’s also a natural mechanism for the things that are maybe not super important. Going back to the question, things fall through the cracks mainly, I’m not going to say only, but mainly when we lack the discipline to make sure that we check progress continuously, then maybe the team changes, for example, now there are layoffs or teams are being restructured and then the ownership changes or there are changes in the priority.

 

We were talking about startups and scale apps that, maybe, you start the year with your audit. You made your decisions and in H2, the priorities change, they are not what they said they were going to be at the beginning of the year. This is true for every team, it’s not only localization. I mean, how many companies spend weeks preparing a roadmap and OKRs, or they wait for next year and then they never open that file, not even once until the year is complete. So, there is no follow-up on what is being done monthly or quarterly or even every half a year.

 

It’s also a matter of discipline, I guess. If the audit is being reviewed every six or twelve months and there are comments being added, both when an item is prioritized, and when a topic is not prioritized. Nothing should fall through the cracks and when I say adding notes when a topic is not prioritized, it’s really important that when you add notes to your audit, that you add the note, not as if you were going to read them, but if anyone with a localization background would have to read it in the future, because you don’t know if you will leave the company, or if you will change and move into a different position within the company.

 

So, you must ensure continuity, so when you add these notes when you write the audit, you cannot just add and not prioritize, no objective, because you know you’re going to understand it, because maybe you won’t in 12 months. You must think about what if somebody else was reading my audit or the results of my audit, would they understand what I am trying to say here?

 

As for who should be in charge? It’s up to each company, depending on their setup, and again, here we talk about ownership. Who has ownership? If for example there is a QA team, they can oversee reviewing the part of the audit concerning the QA results and initiative. If it’s a part about tooling and internationalization, maybe the PM or the localization engineer, if you have one in your team, would be responsible for that.

 

In my case, I am the dev team, just me. So, there’s no question about who should do it. I do it because I am the only one that’s there. But when the team is bigger, sharing these responsibilities is good for engaging as well, as for the team.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Teresa, how do you measure the impact of the localization audit results implementation on the overall organizational objectives and performance? You mentioned KPIs and OKRs earlier. But what is the standard framework or best practices, if you will, that we could apply to make sure that everything is aligned?

 

Teresa Toronjo

Hopefully, ideally, it should happen naturally. What I mean by this is, when you use your audit to create your localization objectives, KPIs and your initiatives, and they are created correctly and aligned with the company objectives and performance, at the end, you should have a straight line. Like we were talking about the company objective is growth. The objective is global efficient growth. Then we had reduced time by X percent or time by X percent. Then we had our ending.

 

Maybe what we can do is look at some common company objectives and give some examples of each of them, so that we can see how they align. Some common company objectives are, I’m just going to mention, four, but I’m sure there are hundreds. But these are, I think, the ones that come up most often. Demand, conversion, growth and efficiency.

 

So, we take the first one, which is demand. For example, it can be connected to brand awareness where localization plays a key role, of course, in making sure the tone of voice, the brand identity are trans created to elicit the same feeling and actions on the final user. So, you could say the objective is demand. According to my audit, there is no tone of voice in the company. So, I want to increase the brand identity in the product or in my company. My initiative is going to be to create a tone of voice guideline and trans create it for the different markets in which we operate.

 

Another example is conversion and conversion can be connected to the quality of the microcopy translations, especially in the back, or the sign-up flow of a new user, or the payment flow, or a marketplace. Here, if conversion is a big thing for your company, you could say, OK, the objective is conversion. My KPI is going to be to increase the click through or to increase the conversion in the payment by implementing an A-B test. So, I’m going to implement an A-B test with the CTA wording, or, for example, more variables can be used to create a more personalized experience for the user. Therefore, increasing the chance of conversion.

 

So instead of just saying, hello, how can I help you today? I’m going to say, hello, Sultan, how can I help you today? Or I will send you targeted messages as well. So, this is directly connected to internationalization, which I mentioned before, and therefore also localization.

 

If we take growth, growth can be connected to opening a new market, but it can be connected also to adding a new language in an existing market to reach a bigger target, within that market that was already open. Or maybe even localizing the content to target a specific regional group within the same market. Here it’s easy because you have growth as the objective. The KPI is to have, I don’t know, plus X percent of visits in that market. The initiatives would be to add X language and then measure how the traffic increments in your product after that new language is added.

 

The last one, efficiency. The last one we will talk about, of course. Like I said, there are a lot. Efficiency can be impacted by implementing continuous localization in the product, to reduce time to market, or by including matching translation in some types of content, to reduce the turnaround time and the cost. Or like you mentioned before, by automating product testing.

 

Here again, efficiency together with growth, I think, are two of the easiest ones to measure. If the common objective is efficiency, then maybe your KPI can be to reduce the time by X percent, or the cost by X percent. Then, inside your initiative, I don’t know, implement a new CMS, apply matching translation post-editing in 50 percent of our content, reduce cost in specific languages by X percent by applying matching translation post-editing, etc. So, these are some examples.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

You chose some of the most important KPIs, that I’ve seen, that enterprises commonly focus on when it comes to this type of efficiencies, or improvements that they want to bring in. Let’s talk about resources, Teresa, you touched on this earlier. You mentioned that you are an army of one within your own organization. How would a company that doesn’t have enough resources implement the audit results?

 

Teresa Toronjo

Yes, we touched on this earlier and it is a topic very close to my heart because, as I mentioned before, it’s one of the challenges I find most interesting. There are many types of resources. Time, people, money, tooling.

 

Let’s talk about money specifically, because I think it’s one of the things that is most connected to the rest and the principles can then be applied to other categories. Also, if you ask any of my colleagues working closely with me, they will tell you that I’m always looking out for data and efficiency. Yes, but also money. So, I’m always asking, what is the business impact of this request and how is this going to have a return on investment? How many people are going to read this article? I’m always asking what it transforms to, in terms of resources.

 

So, let’s focus on resources, specifically on money. I’m not saying it’s the only resource that counts. I’m just saying there are others, but we also have limited time. So, let’s just pick this one. Of course, there are many different situations. I would maybe focus on three. The first one is if the budget is big. It looks like you won’t have any difficulties like you. They give you the budget and they tell you, OK, last year you needed this amount for next year. You have doubled that amount of money, and we don’t need to buy new tooling. We’re not opening new markets. We’re not opening new verticals.

 

So, you know, still, I would encourage any localization manager or team to have the mindset of how to increase efficiency and reduce the cost, even if that is the case. So, your question was specifically about the organizations with limited resources. These are the two cases that I wanted to talk about. So, the budget is acceptable. So, it’s limited, but it’s not laughably small. It looks like you might make it, but it could also be that you will go over budget.

 

For me, this is the right size of budget. This is where everyone should be because you will need to find ways to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and make sure that people in your team also think critically about how money and resources are spent. This is a good place to be because it pushes you to think about how to shift money and resources around, so you can do as much as possible. You are comfortable with the budget that you have, sometimes you don’t think critically about how you’re spending your money. But when the budget is tight, suddenly automation becomes very important. Suddenly aspects like the tooling and how you have your connecting content, etc., how you’re centralizing your process and the resources that you’re using. Suddenly they become important.

 

We had this example before of reducing the cost of product testing before launching a new market, by doing it online, by automating it, or by maybe focusing only on some flows, instead of every flow. Maybe part of that money can then be invested in buying a new plugin that will automate part of your flow. Therefore, again, saving some money that you can then maybe invest somewhere else. So even if the resources are limited, that is good. It’s not a bad thing to have limited resources. It just makes you more critical about what you do and what you don’t do.

 

Now, the third case, it’s where I wouldn’t want to be, is that the budget is quite below what you would need. It looks like you’re not going to be able to implement the initiatives that you want, or you will go over budget. This is an unpleasant situation to be in. It means that either the company objectives are not reasonable, or they do not resonate with what you decided was going to be your objective or your KPI. So, for example, in 2024 the company wants to launch a new vertical and two languages. But the budget that they approved is half the budget that you had the previous year and the previous year, you didn’t open new markets, you didn’t open new verticals, you didn’t add any languages.

 

So, this is not real and when this happens, a very painful conversation will have to take place to either hone by one year, the launch of the new languages or the launch of the new vertical, or they need to increase the budget accordingly to the ambitions of the company. So, if you have more money than you need, you’ll be critical about it. If you don’t have the money that you need, painful conversation. If you have a limited budget, that is the sweet one.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Do you think there would be a direct correlation between the localization audit findings and the performance of localization team members? Would these results affect their KPIs on a personal level?

 

Teresa Toronjo

I like this question, because it touches a bit on management style, too, I find it’s a tricky subject. Although on a big level, it depends on how the company handles performance and performance review in connection to the objectives and the KPIs, in my opinion, is ultimately a very subjective topic. It’s very influenced by the manager, the managing style of your direct supervisor or lead.

 

So just to take a step back, there are several theories about whether it is good to connect performance to KPIs. So, on the one hand, if you connect the goals to performance, this can lead to people having the fear of taking the risk and the mentality of we keep doing things that we have always done them because they work. I am worried that if I change things, and something breaks, I will be “punished” in my performance review. But on the other hand, of course, it’s important to make any person in any team, not only localization, feel that they are the experts and that they are accountable for the choices that they make and that they have ownership of their performance.

 

So going back to your question, and having said that, the audit will show both whether the department is performing well, and where we’re doing a great job. But it will also inevitably show where we are not doing a good job, where we are underperforming as a team and individually, and where we need to improve.

 

When you look at it from that perspective, from a positive point of view, the audit can be a tool to help teams understand why the choices are made, be part of the setting of their own KPIs and decide on the initiative. So hopefully, yes, it has an impact. Hopefully, it is a positive impact that creates the right environment for the teams to challenge and be part of the KPIs and the objective setting and therefore that they feel more in control of their performance and performance review, as a team, of course, but also individually, because I feel that often, people are told, these are the objectives, these are the KPIs, and these are the initiatives, and you do them.

 

I think it’s much better to say, okay, we did the audit, these are the results, let’s look together at the company objectives. Let’s decide together what is not working, and what can work, we know in which direction we are going. You were talking about direction before, we have the direction, we have the target where we want to go. Now you, as an expert, decide how we are going to get there, how we are going to do that.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That’s important to determine your direction, as you mentioned earlier, based on this information. But again, at the end of the day, the audit results, if they’re numbers, or if they’re just suggestions, are information. What do you do with that information? It comes down to someone who has the ability and skills to translate that into action. Let’s talk about how you consider that, and how things such as technology, for example, changes that your competition has adopted or external factors such as changing demographics and interpreting your localization audit numbers, how do they affect you. How do you consider those, to in a way, modernize? How do you take these findings or information about yourself that you didn’t know before and adopt them?

 

Teresa Toronjo

You asked about technology, competitors and external factors. I find that the changes made by the competition a very interesting one, I would maybe rephrase it to changes implemented by industry peers. We all learn together, and this may be even more so in the field of localization, where you learn mostly on the job. Having a good network is important and following up on what peers do, and what other companies are doing is necessary.

 

I’m going to connect this with what you said before about direction. It is also important to have a critical mind and, you know, know where the limitations or the needs of your specific company are. Of course, there are other companies out there in the same market as Malt, for example, the company I work for, but that doesn’t mean that our strategy, or needs, or main values are the same as our competitors, or peers, or products, or teams, or cultures, or tools are also not same. So yes, keep an eye out.

 

I don’t know if you know Simon Sinek, but of course, you know him, he does TED talks and published Start with Why. He has a thing called the celery test. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. But the essence is that you must know your company’s why very well, before you try to fit it into anyone else’s strategy, objectives, or even market trends. You know that everyone is doing it doesn’t mean you have to do it too.

 

So yes, keep an eye out, but also keep front and center in your mind, does that match with our “why” in our company with what we believe is important and with our values. Technology is also a bit like that, like the changes made by the competition, not everything will fit your company, it’s important to consider the help that the right technology and the right tools can provide for your company in terms of efficiency.

 

When doing the audits, you also must keep scaling in mind. So especially when it comes to technology and tooling, when you think about what you need, you cannot think about what you need today, or what you’re going to need in six months, but you need to think about will this support my growth and/or ambition in five years. So that’s also very important in terms of the technology when you’re doing the audit.

 

Also, to keep your mind a bit farther away from the present and as for demographics and other external factors, I am a big internationalization. If your team can push for certain markets or languages to be added, then definitely add that to your audit. If your team is not at that stage, then write down what needs to be done to get there. Take a close look at internationalization while you’re doing the audit, the base of how your content was created, and what the real possibilities in terms of localization are it will help you adapt to external factors more easily and be responsive quickly when things change.

 

So, for example, as a European company working with euros, you think you should open to the USA, but you don’t have the multi-currency. You cannot show your projects online in dollars, then that might be a blocker. Even if today you’re not thinking of growth as a main priority or objective, you should still conduct your audit not only thinking about today, but also about how you slowly include nationalization-based practices so you can adapt to the external factors.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Teresa, what is your ideal localization audit report format or structure? How would you like to see it so it’s easy for you to understand and obviously use it?

 

Teresa Toronjo

You said something before that I found particularly interesting. You said you also need a person capable of turning those ideas into something concrete and actionable. If you went to the Paris office now and asked my manager and the people that I work most closely with what words define me, they would probably tell you that one of the words that would probably come up would be organized, maybe too organized. The truth is that I have no choice but to be organized because my mind is very chaotic. So, I need external tools and guidelines to put order into what goes into my head.

 

So, for me, it’s particularly challenging because as I say, everything is happening at the same time and thoughts are continuously moving in there. It depends on the type of person that you are. I’m going to answer what works for me. At Malt specifically, we use Notion. So, I created a new page there with a full report, and the page, this page in Notion was changing shape continually. I’m saying Notion, but it can be any tool. In the beginning, it was just this never-ending list of items that were divided into categories. So, the categories that I mentioned at the beginning, like tooling, stakeholder, communication, data on volumes, on languages. As I progressed through my audit, I kept adding categories or pieces of information I thought were missing.

 

Once I had the bulk of that, I started to divide that within each section into what was very good, what was okay, and what could be better. And then the third step was you add yet another section where I was adding the impact and the investment needed. So, like the effort needed. And additionally, I had a section of archive things. So, things that I’d maybe consulted, and I just put them on their archive because I wasn’t going to need them just in case, because you never know.

 

And another list of all the resources that I found useful, both internally at Malt, but also externally on the internet, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, and a book that I used during my audit. And I had that reference list as well. And that worked for me. For someone else, it might be more useful to start by having a key structure to which to add the information, or maybe use a different type of tool. In my case, as you mentioned, the biggest challenge was to be able to capture my thoughts, take that information and transform it into something physical, useful, and readable.

 

I strongly recommend Getting things done by David Allen as a good starting point. I use a lot of his strategies during my audit. But yes, we touched on this during our previous conversation, didn’t we? There is no official structure to conduct this out there. So, it’s a bit difficult to have the format.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Teresa, in closing, as we reach the end of this conversation, can you share some thoughts about how our enterprise colleagues can best implement localization audit results as tangible initiatives within their organizations?

 

Teresa Toronjo

It’s a challenge, isn’t it? But it’s a challenge for many teams and departments, not only localization. I will try to focus on maybe five main points that are a bit generic, so not necessarily only for localization, but in general. The first one is something that we mentioned repeatedly, and it’s to make sure you know the DNA of your company very well and that you keep informed and up to date with the company’s main goals and objectives. Then prioritizing saying “no”, which is very important, will be easier. So, the “why” of your company.

 

Number two would be keeping a “things can always be better” mindset. Just because something works or because you have enough budget, it does not mean that things can be better or that you could be spending the money more smartly. Here I would ask myself, if it were my time and my money, would I feel good about how I spend it? So yes, even when a company has enough money, and there are no crises and the budget is big, keep a critical mind on how you’re using that budget or how you’re using those resources that you have.

 

Three would be measure as much as you can. So, data, data, data, and be vocal about your achievements in a way that the company can understand them. So having data will make gaining stakeholder agreement easier. Going back to our first point, saying no easier tool, because you can say, “well according to the data”, that is not a priority, or there is not a strong case for that.

 

Four, and this is not something that we touched a lot on, but that we mentioned maybe just once, but I feel strongly about is, involve your teams in the audit so they understand why the main goals and the objectives are selected and let them be part of the KPI and initiative setting. It will help you ensure that you’re all rowing in the same direction, but also that everyone feels part of the team. Especially in times like now, when sometimes motivation is a bit low, I think it’s very important.

 

The last one, it’s about what we mentioned at the very beginning, maybe evangelization as well, but it push-first strategy and be proactive instead of reactive. Localization is a growth machine. Ask for your seat at the table, be part of the decision making and believe in your knowledge and what you can bring, what you can contribute to, in the company. Don’t be shy about it. Be noisy about it. I would say those are my five main takeaways of what we discussed.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That was a fun and very, very interesting conversation, Teresa. I think it was a nice segue, from our previous conversation that we had and you’ve kind of concluded everything about enterprise localization audit. This can be applied to both smaller enterprises as well as larger ones. You’ve talked so much in detail about the different components and different resources that are needed to implement this.

 

I am very impressed. I’m glad we have completed that conversation today. You truly represent the standard of how localization should be executed in enterprises. I would be delighted to continue to speak with you about how you use your experience and ideas to innovate in this space. With that, Teresa, let me thank you for your time and for sharing all your thoughts and experiences with me today.

 

Teresa Toronjo

I’m happy to be back anytime. And thank you for your time.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Okay, it’s time for my roundup of the interview and my analysis as to what has been discussed. Performing a localization audit is a good way to determine where your organization is at when it comes to localization maturity. The results of such an audit are critical to be interpreted properly to make the necessary changes or updates to your enterprise localization model to ensure all processes, resources, people, and outcomes are aligned with the vision, mission, and objectives of your organization.

 

Teresa covered some important topics about how to read, own, and implement the data that comes out of this audit. I agree with Teresa that the localization manager or the person in charge of globalization, whatever their title may be, must oversee the implementation of this audit and ensure it reflects the needs of the localization unit, which could mean more funding, resources, or input and involvement in the upstream and downstream content delivery processes.

 

That brings us to the end of this episode. I am delighted that this podcast was able to deliver information that was hopefully relevant to your localization practice and even if one person in our industry was able to use this information to improve something, then the goal of this podcast is already accomplished.

 

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or your platform of choice and give this episode a five-star ranking. Until next time.

 

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