Reach by Unbabel

Vasco: Today on Reach we have with us Anna Schlegel. Anna is the head of globalization at NetApp and an expert at entering global markets. She was part of Cisco’s first localization team and led Xerox, VeriSign and VMWare and Digital Groups. She is co-founder and board member of Women in Localization which has more than two thousand members, catering to localization expert; this is an association at Foster’s membership, now working in best practices for companies to go global. She’s a native of Catalonia, speaks 6 languages, grew up trilingual and has a variety of linguistic and philology graduate degrees and has been featured in numerous publications such as Fortune and Forbes. Welcome it’s a pleasure to have you and have a chance to talk to you. Thank you very much.   Anna: Of course, thank you.   Vasco: So before you joined Cisco, initially you started with your own translation company in San Francisco and now you are the head of globalization of a public company with more than 12,000 employees. It’s been quite a trip and you've seen both sides of the market, as a vendor, as a buyer in this market. What was the journey like and what do you feel were the main changes over the years?   Anna: It's been quite the journey. The changes over the years, so when I had my own translation company, we didn't talk about localization, we talked about translation and editors and we used Word Perfect and we used to drive across San Francisco with CDs and discs, not even CDs, it was floppy discs and hard discs. That’s how it was back then. I used to print a lot of the projects and hand deliver those projects.   Vasco: How did you divide that, the practicality of dividing work amongst people…   Anna: Phone calls and fax machines. I had interns in my business where they were printing resumes. The resumes would get to me in a P.O. Box via snail mail. I would put ads in the newspaper like, I need more translators. There was no internet back then.   Vasco: So you had to get translators locally   Anna: All my translators were local.   Vasco: Oh, wow   Anna: All my Japanese and Chinese translators initially they were all local. I used to do a lot of work for Levi Strauss and for the city of San Francisco, so yes everybody was local. You can imagine then that changed to email and we got out of Word Perfect within a couple of years and I remember hearing the word localization initially and with anything, that’s scary, like the first time I heard machine translations. The first time you heard, you need to deliver this via email or you need to upload it to a fpt. All these things were very scary back then,   Vasco: Now you are one of the more vocal people about the potential of using MT solutions as in globalization. This is kind of awesome. I have a lot of questions. Go ahead, maybe we can address MT afterwards, which is kind of an interesting topic.   Anna: I think your question was, how did you go from owning a translating agency to leading a globalization team. It takes many years, trying different jobs at different companies. I was a translator myself, I was a project manager then a program manager. I was a QA tester for Lucent for a couple of years so I wrote test scripts; I had to then try my own thing. I worked a lot with telephone companies to do all the IVR3 for their phones, messaging in different languages. I ran web teams. I was an operations manager for a main translating agency on the West Coast. It takes a lot of business savvy and understanding all the different corners of the business. So I was never about to be just a translator or a project manager. I wanted to try out all the different aspects of the business.   Vasco: Did you know that early on, even before you started your own translation company, did you know that translation is just a path to something bigger?   Anna: No. I started my translating company when I was 23. I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that I had a degree in different languages and that I could translate. Not necessarily that I could translate anything that was technical. It was when I was hired by Cisco to start their first team that I got into the technicality of the Silicon Valley and the routers and telecommunications and engineering, which was very foreign to me because I was coming from a Masters in Linguistics with Nietzsche, Goethe, Schiller, and Vladimir, and I had no clue what they were talking about.   Vasco: It’s a very different language and Silicon Valley has such a unique culture.   Anna: I remember having panic attacks at the beginning. There were talking about objectives and goals and visions and charters and teams and reporting structures that was the biggest shocker of my life, so that's how you start you just trust and at the next company you do it better and you understand more and you see different models and basically the goal is to learn something at every company that you are and if you are somebody that wants to be exposed to more then you might need to be ready to change companies and move up and try different things and follow your gut and give that much to how much you want to learn how much you want to learn and then move on.   Vasco: I’m sure it is just the beginning of the journey, it is quite impressive. Yes so as I was saying before one of the things that strike me as really interesting is kind of the shift that seem to be happening in the space towards starting to embrace machine translation as one potential tool and I feel that there is still a lot of division where there is maybe some mistrust sometimes and sometimes well deserved from especially from people that have a lot translation background but you seem to be kind of one of the proponents that like, well we're changing towards where customers really value speed and efficiency and the ability to really just communicate and we should just embrace these technologies as a way to provide better customer service. I assume that is something that you guys do at NetApp?   Anna: That is right, so NetApp is a highly innovated company itself. NetApp is constantly releasing announcements, product launches, new ideas, solutions on a daily basis to the market, so NetApp as you know most companies out there have fierce competition, so if you want to allow your company to go global at the rate that they deserve you need to be able to keep up with what they want to say in different languages around the world.   Vasco: Yeah.   Anna: So you are not going to do that with a very a traditional method. If you put your content and your ideas and solutions through a regular work flow, or your tools or products are not ready to go global you won’t be able to help your company and so for us to be able to keep up with the pace of the company we have to automate, we have to be consistently cutting work flows and obviously we have different solutions for different types of content and machine translations is one of them. Obviously translation management systems is one of them, connecting digital content management systems through the translation management systems is something that we’ve done here as well. So you cannot rely on a traditional, regular process. You just can’t rely on that.   Vasco: So is it easy to sell that inside the company or do you find resistance where certain offices and certain branches and certain countries will see some MT and will maybe complain about a particular translation that happened. Do you have to demonstrate specific ROI or do you have specific metrics that show that this provides much better value for what we’re doing.   Anna: I have a secret.   Vasco: Ok cool   Anna: We don’t tell anybody. I just do it.   Vasco: That’s awesome.   Anna: Why do you want to make your internal customers nervous about it?   Vasco: Of course.   Anna: As long as they get content that they like, the quality that they like, by the time that they need, in the languages that they requested. I don’t tell them how the content got there.   Vasco: That’s interesting. The quality that they like, but do you ask them a priori what is the quality that they expect?   Anna: Do you know anybody that has read a product manual in Chinese?   Vasco: That’s a good point.   Anna: We have a content classification where you know inside a company that field marketing managers are going to read what you give them. They will probably want to massage the content, probably want a rewrite, or restyle some of the content. So if you’re producing a press release, they will want to read it. If you’re producing a 200 page product manual, they are going to scan it at best and eventually, so what we do is we negotiate with partners in China or in Japan or different countries. If they would be okay with receiving automated machine translation content, we first get the agreements that way. We don’t let anybody within our company know what methods we’re using for localization. It would just give them a heart attack I think and so what we do is we devise the best work flows and yes we tell them that we use automation but we don’t go into details, as to what sort of automation. They understand that content fits in repositories and there is some black box and black magic happens to return that content into X number of languages. Yes we believe in automation.   Vasco: That’s great. It makes a lot of sense and I always feel that a lot of the problems exactly, when you start the discussion. Every time you have a discussion about language, it’s very easy to get into situations where it becomes so subjective, that in cases like …   Anna: You need to remove language as part of the equation. I think the translators and project managers, we need to move the conversation, and change the conversation I’m not interested in translation. I’m interested in when they need the content, why they need the content, why are your customers going to be excited by this content, where they want it published. That’s more interesting. What are the metrics that you expect? What do you want this content to do for you versus do you mind if I use machine translation. That is the totally wrong conversation to have.   Vasco: And it’s not even a very Silicon Valley approach. Ask for forgiveness not for permission.   Anna: They don’t care, that’s why they hire us to give them good solutions to keep up with the rest and don’t bore them with the details. I keep it very black box so to speak, the methods that we use, we have good senders that give us good quality so we spend a lot of time in this black box, designing the black box, putting the right systems to right automation but that’s a conversation that I need to have or that my team needs to have…   Vasco: So it’s internal. That makes a lot of sense.   Anna: That’s my philosophy.   Vasco: Especially as we move towards the need for speed to keep things updated and it reminds me of something else that I read, one of the things that you wrote about social, which I think is very evident in social, more and communications are happening social. Customer service conversations, the interaction between customers and companies. In that case you even need to be faster in terms of turn around times of communication. Which is kind of a problem, especially when it comes to Twitter for example, machine translations doesn’t really work well on Twitter yet. One of the things that I was reading that was very interesting is how you describe that one of the trends for this year is companies should pay more attention globalising their social presence. How much of an issue do you think that's going to become?   Anna: That is a huge issue. When I mean globalising social media doesn’t mean that you need to translate the Tweets. To me globalising social media means the following: Why are we tweeting to China via Twitter. They don’t use Twitter, they don't use Facebook, so why are companies doing that? Find other methods that are working out in their country. Now that’s number one. The US corporations, or European corporations or African corporations that want to get into APAK as an example, they need to understand that landscape really, really well. They need to have people onsite to be able to do that for them. So that’s one part, the other part it there is a social listening that needs to happen and it’s not happening. People are not reading these 100 product manuals anymore. They are hooked up to their sites, their social media sites, whatever that may be. To me a lot of the writers, they’re writing for these big manuals. I would rather see them spending time in the community or spending time answering questions on communities and forums where the actual users and potential customers are going.   Vasco: That’s a great point   Anna: We actually need a little bit of a revolution around all these information engineering and tech spots stories and that’s what I mean, we need to globalise this social media.   Vasco: That makes a lot of sense. It feels to me that one of the issues is that there is still this expectation and sometimes legal expectation that there is going to be this manual. That at some point you’re going to be able to go into this book or even digital format and everything is going to be laid out there. You’re right, that’s not how people interact with information anymore for the most part. People expect the ability to have much more dynamic information and customized and interacting with the human or someone that can customize that information for them is a much better experience than having to deal with this big manual. A lot of the times the language, it’s not even relatable. That’s a great point. You mentioned China a couple of times and I read other things that you wrote about entering China. Should China be the first thing that a company not in China should think in terms of entering a market?   Anna: No!   Vasco: How was that? So NetApp entered China in 2007 and now there is …   Anna: China is very complex, so if you are not in Asia yet, it's not that Japan is easy but Japan has more similarities to let's say the States or Europe in the form of conducting business. I know there are huge cultural differences but at least there’s more regulations. China is the wild west right now. They have obviously grown up and studied and in China there is incredible government regulations that are very different than our concepts.   Vasco: Can you give us an example?   Anna: Sure, I can give you an example where you will follow a regular agile product process here in the States to deliver a product in China and they can approve you or use your acceptance testing and then when you’re ready to launch your product they don’t like it anymore.   Vasco: Why is that?   Anna: Because they can, it’s as simple as that. They don’t follow agreements in a common sense way for us. Their common sense is their common sense. So if I do a project with you and we meet five times and we agree we’re going to remove this, we are going to add this, these are the features, we’re going to launch these bags, we’re going to probably go for that goal in a much easier way than if I do that with a Chinese company   Vasco: Do you think it’s because it’s a matter of perhaps having a stronger interaction with the customer in that case?   Anna: No.   Vasco: No, okay!   Anna: I’m not talking about American companies in China, I’m talking about Chinese companies. So government run companies, state owned companies, finance banking institutions. They are not relying on American companies yet but they would like to partner with them to either grab their ideas or ask for their source codes. I mean they are a number of companies right now or regulations coming in from China where they are trying to ask for the source codes of products that are made in Europe and products that are made in the States and so there is a lot of mistrust right now and if your product is a purse it's very different than if it’s an engineering product, let me put it that way. If it’s a purse, they will probably replicate it and sell it as if they had made it.   Vasco: Do you think that is always the case, the goal of getting access to the source code or the idea is for replication? Or is it meant…   Anna: Have you been to China?   Vasco: I haven’t, unfortunately not yet.   Anna: Then that is very much the case now yes.   Vasco: Okay   Anna: I live it all day long. Today is January 28th; there is an article today that I was reading on the New York Times that was talking about some of the new regulations that they are being demanded by the Chinese governments as to releasing source codes to several companies and so American companies or European companies are going to have to wake up and are going to have to put some sort of foot in front of this because they are really getting ahead and securing their production and their ideas as if they were theirs.   Vasco: Well and yet at the same time it seems that from reading some of your articles and a lot of other information that the only way to actually get into China is to get a partner. That’s almost a requirement that you need to.   Anna: It is. If you are entering to sell something or produce something that they already have or is similar to something that they have, you are at the disadvantage. If you are there to sell something new, you have an advantage. If they haven’t created it yet, you have the upper hand.   Vasco: That’s interesting and yet you keep hearing and it is true not only in Silicon Valley but in Europe especially that continuously small companies see China as this great potential. So whenever I ask companies where you think of expanding…   Anna: It is. It’s a little bit short sighted or it’s a very delicate balance and everybody should try to get into China. I think the balance is finding the right partner you can trust who is not going to have access to your source codes and so if you have a very strong legal team and their legal team agree on IP protection and brand agreement et cetera, then obviously the relation can be very productive and very successful. But right now, you do see American companies starting to do some interesting things to be able to get in while they are leaving and losing their identity and their brand. So you see different models like co-branding or rebranding or de-branding so there is many different ways of doing this, it’s not an easy process and it requires legal teams and engineering and marketing teams and usually product marketing agreeing on how much are they willing to give up. Because basically you are not going in with your brand.   Vasco: It’s really hard if at some time you want to establish your brand.   Anna: I am talking about technology; I am not talking about if you’re Chanel. I was just there last week. So you do see Chanel stores already.   Vasco: And they’ve had huge success in this last quarter in China.   Anna: Huge success. That’s right. The problem is that you can also buy Chanel for a tenth of the price if you go to their silk market.   Vasco: Typically what we see on that part of Chanel is more what comes out. Kind of fakes that you can buy outside. I imagine that is much more appealing once you’re inside.   Anna: That’s right.   Vasco: That's great. So is there any advice that you would give for young companies that are trying to be global. I hear also more of this idea of global from day one and I see two sides of this argument because on one hand there is strong advice from don’t try to reach too far, try to focus on your home market or one specific market until you really understand your product. On the other hand a lot of companies are becoming global by design but from the beginning where there are web services and they start getting customers all over and things kind of grow organically. Do you have any advice for what strategies do you think makes sense and if so is there are particular countries that you think are particularly easy in terms of regulatory or in terms of culture if you’re a U.S company for example to get into.   Anna: If you are brand new, I would start by hiring the right people. Whatever your country is, hire people that have travelled, hire people that have lived outside or that tend to speak several languages or that have done business or have studied elsewhere would be typically a little more open minded and will make you more successful in going global, that would be one thing, so hire global talent. The other thing would be the right infrastructure, so if you are implementing SalesForce.com, or you’re implementing a content management system for your website or a field portal for your partners or your customers. In your requirements up front make sure that you pretend that you already went global. That you already need this for Japan, you already need this for Greece or The Middle East or Israel or wherever it is that you are planning to go global and sell your product. Again these are thing that you can do from the very beginning. Hire global talent, people that are experienced in running global teams. Whatever it is, legal global expertise, HR global expertise, IT global expertise that is very, very important.   Vasco: Well how often do you get to China?   Anna: I go to China, once or twice a year. I’ve been going for probably 7 or 8 years now.   Vasco: It’s going to very interesting as China becomes a bigger market and more mature and its now by some accounts bigger than the United States. It’s going to be interesting to see if they are going to start seeing the reverse problems.   Anna: Yeah.   Vasco: In the next few years if they don’t slow down, it's going to become very interesting to see where it leads and how much in terms of globalization. A lot of the world doesn't speak English but for businesses working in English is still easier than working in other languages, unless it is your home language. But for Chinese businesses I wonder what's going to happen once they try to become global. Once Alibaba goes international and Xiaomi goes international. What's going to be their strategies for globalisation and how they are going to deal with issues that American companies have been dealing with by going global.   Anna: That's right.   Vasco: That's going to be very interesting. Well thank you very much. It was great having you.   Anna: Absolutely.   Vasco: Thank you for being a part of Reach and I hope to talk to you soon.   Anna: Very good. Thank you.

Vasco: Hi, guys. Welcome back to Reach with Unbabel. I’m Vasco Pedro and this is the second part of our conversation with Silvia Oviedo Lopez, the Head of Internationalization at Pinterest. In this part of the conversation, we’re going to cover a variety of topics, from feedback to machine translation to the value of good copy. Silvia even discusses how she thinks our brains are being rewired to act more like search engines. Let’s get back into it. Here’s the second half of our conversation with Silvia Oviedo Lopez, Head of Internationalization at Pinterest.   Silvia: I employ all translation methods known to humanity in our process. Like me, I like the fact that we have a very lean process, we have a very lean team. In-house we’re one and a half, then we have three Project Managers, a couple agencies, freelancers, et cetera, that help with the load, but I like to keep things as lean as possible. We are using from raw machine translation to post-editing, translation and just …   Vasco: Everything.   Silvia: Corporate, translation plus review, translation plus review plus editor plus copywriting plus review again plus QA, so every content has its needs.   Vasco: And how do you determine? I mean, so for each of those content, basically it’s a different process. I mentioned that it’s both because of speed and quality, right? And so, how do you determine that quality? How do you know, well, like we need to be able to move this up to a different process given that it’s a big amount of content? I mean, you probably don’t have the ability to review it all, right? I mean, given all the language that you speak, that makes it easier, but still, if you have something in Chinese, then someone needs to figure out if that’s good enough or if we need a different process.   Silvia: Yeah, so we have a well-thought process when it comes to quality and we have all the review and QA mechanisms and feedback loops. I think that feedback is an essential part of translation. And, as a translator myself, I remember when I was in college, the professor would come with feedback like, “This is terrible” or … More nicely, but basically like, “This translation sucks, Silvia.” And my first reaction was to get pretty defensive. Feedback in translation’s like the best gift you can get. And when you create the right feedback loops, as translators, reviewers, QA people, local team members, users, it’s like you get this fantastic place where you’re shaping the language of a product and that really doesn’t compare to anything else. But going back to how do you decide where each content should go, like a lot of people will tell you, “Well, everything should be translated and reviewed then, re-reviewed then.” I think you have to go for your MVP for each type of content. Like, what is the least of amount of review that you can get away with? And that will vary.   Vasco: Right.   Silvia: Like for when we are localizing a video, it goes through analysts around soft review.   Vasco: Of course, yeah, that makes sense.   Silvia: Products, it’s like it’s constant. There’s thousands of pairs of eyes everyday, if not more.   Vasco: I imagine your users also let you know, right?   Silvia: Yeah.   Vasco: If something is not accurate.   Silvia: That’s actually a funny story, it happened to me once. A user wrote very persuaded because of a translation error. It was more of a linguistic or a terminology discussion but the user was really passionate. And that happened pre-Pinterest but it was a very good conversation with the translator and they ended up in a really good place. But I find it fantastic that people speak up and say, like, “Hey, I think your translation is terrible because of … blah blah blah. You should now feel terrible. It’s like …   Vasco: But that’s also an issue I feel with users, right? Is that people get really passionate about things they believe are not ideal. And there’s a degree of subjective criticism in translation. Should you have something a little more literal? Should you … ? Some people don’t like the tone or don’t like the way you say things and they get very vocal and how do you deal with that, right? I mean, having those discussions sometimes with users is, obviously, you want to put your Pinners first and you want to put your users first, but on the other hand, if you’re trying to, “Listen, no, no. I believe that this is the correct translation.” And mediating that sometimes can be a little hard.   Silvia: I think it’s always kind of hard to quantify language, but fortunately I had a few people in my career that taught me how to do that and if it’s not objective feedback, I won’t take it.   Vasco: Okay, so the “Oh, this is horrible, this sucks”?   Silvia: Yeah. I don’t buy that because I don’t speak Polish and you told me that sucks, you need to tell me more. You need to tell me how it makes you feel that the grammar is wrong because it doesn’t follow these rules. But saying like, “It’s bad,” that’s something that happens a lot with machine translation or like lower tiers of quality. Like, of course, if you have ten people looking at a translation trying to find exactly the right message, it’s going to be fantastic, of course. But you don’t need fantastic always, you sometimes can …   Vasco: Fill a knowledge base, for example.   Silvia: Yeah, you can …   Vasco: You might even use more information.   Silvia: Yeah. So something that a lot of people say is, “Machine translation is really bad.” I think machine translation is a fantastic human development.   Vasco: Right, yeah, yeah.   Silvia: Machine translation …   Vasco: Is getting better.   Silvia: It’s bad if you speak both languages. If you don’t speak a language, suddenly it becomes the most useful tool that you can use.   Vasco: That’s interesting.   Silvia: My mom speaks Spanish, that’s it. Like 50% of her Internet consumption comes thanks to machine translation.   Vasco: Wow! I guess it’s very easy, especially in the U.S., to forget that the Internet is majority English, 80% English, and if you don’t speak English, it’s complicated. Even in terms of simple things, like instructions or how to save a document or how to browse, go to a website, how to use Google. I see that also in my in-laws, like older generation Portugal, that’s very common.   Silvia: Yeah, and I think we try to be too good, which … And it would be fantastic if you could have every single piece of content on the Internet …   Vasco: Which was a little bit the promise of machine translation, right? I think sometimes the challenge in machine translation is that there was a very high promise. This idea that by now 2014, we would have like this perfect translation machine that would sound exactly like a human. And I agree with you, I think that the advances have been amazing, but somehow, like, I think people see in sci-fi movies, the Star Trek of like universal communicator and expect this ability, this fluency of just communication in any environment. And of course we’re not there yet. I mean, machine translation’s just not there yet. I think there’s fundamental issues with machine translation that we haven’t figured out that in a way have to do with the human brain itself and how we communicate and how we learn language and it’s going to be a while until we do that, right? But I think that’s part of the misexpectations of people and I think also because we’re really good at language. It’s a little bit like this uncanny valley in language where if it sounds kind of like a human but it’s not exactly, we get disturbed like, “Oh, it’s a machine and it sounds robotic,” which is kind of stupid because, as you said, it’s really useful for a lot of people in the world.   Silvia: Yeah, I totally agree with you but I think we don’t stop and admire the view. It’s like I can understand any text in any language by clicking a button.   Vasco: It’s true.   Silvia: And it happens in milliseconds.   Vasco: That’s true, it’s amazing.   Silvia: It’s seriously amazing and of course it’s not perfect but if I can just get the gist of it, I’m happy. It’s like how much time do you spare on a text on the Internet anyway? It’s kind of like read 10% the words and you’re happy with it. I think our brains are probably constructing a new way to process language that relies less on grammar and traditional structures and kind of like traditional text structure and more on key words and therefore our brains are starting to process information more and more like a search engine.   Vasco: That’s interesting. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? That’s a very interesting idea.   Silvia: Yeah. So, if you think about the amount of content you consume per day, like if you think about it in terms of words, it’s a crazy amount.   Vasco: Yeah.   Silvia: I don’t know how much you read every day, but I do read a lot of email, I read a lot of …   Vasco: News, blogs.   Silvia: News, Facebook updates and things like that. It’s like you just cannot retain information. Like, I don’t read, I scan. And I think that I’ve really found myself doing is, when I read a novel that I like, I read it on paper because that forces me to read in a linear way, whereas if I read on a screen, I’m just jumping like every five words.   Vasco: Interesting. So did you ever try reading a book or novel in iPad, for example?   Silvia: Yeah. I’m kind of picky with what and how I read, so if it’s something that I know I will enjoy, I will read it on paper because I want to force myself to pay attention as opposed to scan through a page, because otherwise I’ll read like three times as fast and not process all the information and not stop and stare at how the writer constructed the sentence.   Vasco: Right.   Silvia: It’s not about the message, it’s also about how the …   Vasco: The craft.   Silvia: Yeah, the craft of the writer. Whereas if I just want to gain information, I’ll just scan.   Vasco: Silvia, do you think that that’s because you also write and so you’re kind of also looking from a craftsman perspective? Like, Interesting, I wonder how, seriously, he constructed this.   Silvia: Probably. And I really like reading. I really like complex spelling and like give a name to the what you said, also how you say it. And when it comes to the Internet, there are two layers. Sometimes you care about what is being said, but also the how, [as it’s being said is 10:51] really, really important.   Vasco: Silvia, do you usually read in Spanish, English? Doesn’t matter?   Silvia: No, it doesn’t matter.   Vasco: Is there a language you prefer to read it?   Silvia: Not really. It’s like I, now this …   Vasco: What’s your favorite book? Or a few of your favorite books?   Silvia: So, I’ll talk about writers. I have been reading a lot of Roberto Bolaño lately.   Vasco: Yeah.   Silvia: He’s a Latin American writer, fantastic. I also like Thomas Pynchon a lot in English. But these are writers that I can spend days and months with. It’s like I …   Vasco: Why do you like them? Why those writers?   Silvia: It’s really complex structures.   Vasco: So not like Da Vinci Code.   Silvia: No.   Vasco: More Umberto Eco.   Silvia: Yeah.   Vasco: Okay.   Silvia: I think more than that, even.   Vasco: Okay.   Silvia: It’s like they make you think a lot and it’s not only about the message, but also how they craft books. And I think fortunately a lot of that’s trickling to online services, like how you see things.   Vasco: Yeah, that’s interesting, right. So do you think that what we’re going to be seeing and so, even though people are supposedly reading less books, the amount of books that are being published has been increasing steady, right. I mean, there are more books being published now every year than there were a few years ago and it’s a tremendous amount of books. Now, do you think that this content creation’s going to start percolating to the kinds of content in Pinterest or in general websites, where you’re going to see the type of language that’s being used going up the value chain, let’s say, and you’re going to start seeing things that are better written, more well-constructed and moving away from the Tweet-type mentality of key words?   Silvia: Yeah. So I think that, for example, this is talking about Pinterest, we have I think it’s five or six people on our writing team. They take care of making sure that every single sentence on the service is a well-crafted message, that it has intention, that it’s the best way to say whatever we’re trying to say. And that’s something that I’ve seen proliferating in different services as to just like having that content person or team, if you’re big enough, because it does actually make a huge difference. Like, the two words you write on a button may completely change your conversion rate. So it’s like that’s something that growth hackers always talk about, like optimize a tagline, optimize the wording here and there and it’s totally true.   Vasco: It really makes a difference.   Silvia: Yeah, it does make a difference. And that’s something that I feel in the past was not very well taken care of, in general, in many companies, but now that writing part is taking more and more prominence, which is really nice and it also has that impact on the localization aspect of it. It’s like, “Okay, we have six people thinking about how to say this in English.”   Vasco: Right, so that you say it in a much better …   Silvia: Going back to the different levels of quality, it’s like that’s where we put a lot of thought, behind how do we localize this. Because we can all just say, “Okay, whatever translation you come up with, you need to put the same amount of thought into that translation.”   Vasco: That is really a challenge, right? I mean, because in order to go into languages, you might not have the staff available to do that, but then you need to remind some sort of resource, but the chances that the resource is going to have the same amount of care that you had in constructing the content are fairly low.   Silvia: Well, how I approach that problem is a) I trust the people that I hire. So it’s like people who become part of our pool of translators are tested thoroughly.   Vasco: So all of the people that write the final copy for different languages are translators that you interact with directly?   Silvia: Well, not directly but they have been tested.   Vasco: Okay.   Silvia: And we provide them with the thinking behind the sentence.   Vasco: Okay, the context, the semantic structure.   Silvia: It’s like anyone that works on our content has the rationale that the writers have followed.   Vasco: In this channel, Pinterest.   Silvia: Yeah. So it’s like basically, it’s like there are … there’s people with the same accent or they know how the writers think and they can apply that same logic. At the same time we have, as I have mentioned, several feedback loops and in some languages we’ll have more than in others. So for certain types of content, we’ll have more. But at the end of the day, it boils down to synthesizing your spendback and instead of breaking up a 20-page document, make it something that, as a translator, you can tape to your wall.   Vasco: Yeah.   Silvia: You follow what I’m saying? I like this, “What would blah do?” Now, it’s kind of having that that … I need to put myself in the shoes of company A or to put myself in the shoes of writer B, how would I speak if I was that person.   Vasco: So it’s like being a director, you have to give direction enough to the translator.   Silvia: So you’re saying just like, “Think that you’re this person and then go for it.”   Vasco: What was the hardest language to be in, right? So there’s a lot of challenges, sometimes specific to specific markets and dealing with all of these issues that we’ve been talking about, in all these different languages, what was the marker in a language that you thought, This was unexpected. And why.   Silvia: I think that Japan and Korea are tough markets to get the language right because there’s a lot of social-cultural implications that are not present in other markets to that extent. It’s like you have all the a) nailed down to tone, formality or how do you want to speak to users and b) you have the best language, shape the world or thus, the world shapes the language. It’s like the chicken and egg problem. I think the deep structure of the language, the way ideas are conveyed is so different from the Western culture and the Western languages that crawling that over to Korea or Japan is extremely hard. Like all the …   Vasco: Maybe because it’s not conveying the same way.   Silvia: Yeah.   Vasco: Like it’s not just the structure of the language that is different, it’s the structure of the thought.   Silvia: How do you point to the world as a user. I remember one of the things that someone on the ground was telling me, it’s like in English, services speak to people, like your phone speaks to you. “Hey, Silvia, you’ve got a notification.” Like you cannot do that in those languages.   Vasco: How would you do that in Japanese?   Silvia: I cannot tell you. I was in Germany …   Vasco: How do you do that in Japan? Like, would you address … ? What would you address?   Silvia: Like, basically, you don’t animate the object.   Vasco: Okay.   Silvia: So, of course, it’s notifying you but you make the connection of, yeah, service is notifying me, sure, I’ll be biased, but in some cases you cannot just do that. So it’s these cultural things that make it harder to translate services and you have to put a lot of thought behind how you want to approach the problem because then there is tons of theories of translations and there’s conscious brand decisions of how you want to approach that. Do you want to be a foreign company? Because that may actually work well.   Vasco: I see.   Silvia: That may work in your favor. If it was …   Vasco: If you position yourself as a clearly foreign company, you have a foreign tone.   Silvia: Yeah.   Vasco: But that might work because it's a deluxe brand of like, “Oh … ”   Silvia: This German linguist called [?? 18:37] defends the foreignness of translation. Like translation should actually be something foreign and it should struck the reader as, I’m reading something that is not common for my culture, it comes from somewhere else.   Vasco: Right.   Silvia: It’s like that can be a branding decision, like we actually want to sound foreign and we want to … I don’t know if I personally condone that, but that’s definitely, if you want to take that approach, it may work. Like I’ve seen it work for a lot of French brands. Like the French Schick and a lot of make-up and cosmetics brands use that like, “We’re French and we’re going to use this as a marketing tactic.”   Vasco: Right. It feels like consumer brands in technology, for example, they try to really speak your language and they try to feel like, “Yeah, we’re just there with you, we’re in the market.” But I can totally see how fashion or certain times, like German engineering. I mean, the whole idea of German engineering, if it sounds German, so like, “Oh, there’s quality.” Right? Like there’s a certain quality stamp to it. That’s very interesting. Do you feel it’s the same in China?   Silvia: I haven’t worked with China or Chinese projects in Chinese for five years, I think. China is a very specific market but there’s a lot of protectiveness of their own language and services and then how these two map together. But at the same time, there’s a lot of interest in the Western culture and sometimes I feel that U.S. services translate better into Chinese, from what I have seen in the past …   Vasco: Than in Japanese.   Silvia: Than in Japanese. I think there’s more receptiveness, in certain areas, of course. You cannot generalize in China. But it feels there’s more of a connection and it probably has a lot to do with like all the history and the past of China in general, that there is more …   Vasco: Or maybe sort of the recent trend towards capitalism in China kind of puts it more in par with the way that the U.S., for example, tends to see things. And especially products, right? It’s not so much politics, but the products and the interaction between products and consumers. And it feels like in Japan there’s much more of a hierarchy that is explicit in the relationships you have with everything around you. And so that is more expressed through language, perhaps.   Silvia: And I think something else about Japan is that it has also been a technology hub. Sometimes when we think about technology innovation, it’s like lately you think about Silicon Valley, though they’ve been doing a ton of technology services.   Vasco: That’s true. I mean, in GAs that was …   Silvia: Innovation and …   Vasco: Japan was going to invade everything.   Silvia: I’m pretty sure that that has also shaped how they constructed their own object or technological object to human relationship through language.   Vasco: It’s very interesting because Japan clearly has the most advanced conceptualization of that interaction between humans and robots, for example. It’s much more pervasive and a lot of their culture in terms of anime movies, daily interactions, robots are much bigger in Japan than everywhere else and they tend to animate those relationships a lot. But, as you said, in objects like phones, like there’s clearly a distinction between something that is trying to be human in some way and something that is not trying to be human. And I think that gets reflected in huge parts of language, right? I mean, I had one semester of Japanese, I know very, very little …   Silvia: You know more than me then.   Vasco: I know just enough to say I’m a student of Carnegie Mellon and that was pretty much it. I hope my teacher isn’t listening. I learned a lot at the time, but I always got the feeling that the subtleties of how you interact are much more explicit in the language. For example, my teachers used to say that because there are females teaching and that I would learn how to speak like a woman and that I would need to spend time with male teachers, because otherwise it would be very noticeable that I was speaking some inappropriate way. And the words would be the same. Just the way, the emphasis in the tone we’d use. So I imagine that as a machine, you are going to have a hard time in Japan. So one last question. Are there any resources that you would recommend in companies or people thinking of how to approach this problem in internationalization that you think are interesting for people to … ? Either books that you think are useful or authors that you think are interesting reading or, I don’t know, translation manuals.   Silvia: I think, as you mentioned before, there’s not like a, “Here's your localization guide. Like, here you go and now run.”   Vasco: You should write that. You know? Write that book.   Silvia: And that was actually my 2015 resolution.   Vasco: To write that book.   Silvia: Yeah. Write the book. And then all of you listeners, you can buy it and we can call the listeners.   Vasco: “Silvia’s Ultimate Guide to Localization”   Silvia: “How to Survive in the Localization World.” No, but what I would say is that all I have learned is through people in the industry … Something that I feel really, really lucky about is how open everyone is about their localization processes, things that work, things that don’t work. Of course there’s always staff that is arbitrary but everyone’s willing to talk about how they do it because, as I imagined before, I feel that we are kind of not as innovative as other industries and we should do more of that. Like we should open source more of our processes and what’s working, what’s not working. So what I would say is just feel free to reach out, pick people’s brains, we’re usually very willing to do it. And also I think conferences tend to be a good place to start. Sorry that I’m not being specific.   Vasco: No, no, that’s okay.   Silvia: It’s like I …   Vasco: No, but you’re right, there’s not the Ultimate Guide for Localization.   Silvia: Sorry, there’s an awesome book that I'm missing. I’m generalizing, so that’s …   Vasco: There will be an awesome book in 2015: Silvia’s Ultimate Guide to Surviving the Localization World.   Silvia: I would say that, for example, I read that resources on internationalization is all of the open source work that Mozilla has been doing.   Vasco: Right.   Silvia: They have a fantastic corpus of internationalization resources, the best practices, et cetera, and you can see them kind of in progress. I would say that’s a great place. There’s a little on Github.   Vasco: The IMUG group are here in Silicon Valley. I think you can also use the C webcast, maybe that could be interesting. I just remembered that some of their talks on i18n are kind of … Sometimes they talk about very specific things. Sorry, now I’m giving suggestions.   Silvia: No, go for it. And then, yeah, let’s say, thinking about what companies you think are doing a big job in reaching out, asking for advice. I think everyone’s always willing to have a cup a coffee and talk about this part as it is. And the most important thing is trying and going for it and trying. The thing about localization is that it’s not open-heart surgery. So I never have the feeling that, “Oh, my gosh”, if we feel that someone’s going to die, fortunately.   Vasco: Unless you’re localizing open-heart surgery.   Silvia: Yeah, and that’s why I never did any medical translation.   Vasco: Okay.   Silvia: That’s actually a conscious decision. I don’t want to translate anything medical because I don’t want to …   Vasco: Be responsible for them.   Silvia: Yeah. But just try to … So, yeah, if you work for a company that makes open-heart surgery devices just listen to my advice.   Vasco: Well, thank you very much. Thank you for joining us and for sharing all these thoughts.   Silvia: Thank you for having me.   Vasco: Yeah, it’s been a pleasure.   Silvia: Thank you.   Vasco: That’s it for the second part of Episode 2. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Vasco Pedro, and this week’s episode was produced by Drake Ballew. Be sure to tune in next time, when we’ll be speaking with Anna Schlegel of NetApp. See you next time on Reach.

Vasco(intro): Hi guys. Welcome back to Reach with Unbabel. I'm Vasco Pedro and this week we'll be talking with Silvia Oviedo Lopez, the head of internationalization of Pinterest. For this episode we're gonna split the conversation into two parts so that it's easier to listen to. The first part is going to cover Silvia's background in Translation and Interpretation, the translation process that Pinterest employs, the question of when a startup or business should internationalize, and how does she think about it. And finally, Silvia closes this episode with her opinion on what makes Pinterest magical. Let's get into the conversation. Without further ado, Silvia Oviado Lopez, Pinterest, Head of Internationalization.   Vasco: Hi today we have with us Silvia Oviedo Lopez. She leads internationalization at Pinterest and she focuses on growing Pinterest's international footprints. And since the beginning of her career, she has managed communities, content localization of international companies with Yahoo, eBay and Pinterest now. And for a while you also ran your own internationalization and blogging and search engine optimization company? And you studied Translation and Interpreting at University of Complutense of Madrid and Strategic Decision and Risk Management at Stanford. You also speak 8 languages and you're also a poet.   Silvia: Kind of. Yeah I try. I can get by with like 5 and speak 3, 4 somewhat decently.   Vasco: That's pretty awesome. It seems like language is always a very important part of your life.   Silvia: It's funny because I wasn't raised in a bilingual household. Until I was twelve all I can speak was Spanish. But ever since I took my first English lesson that was kinda like the world opened up for me. And if I look back there was always an interest in language itself aside from second languages or third languages. As a kid I was very obsessed with words and language and the use of language. So, I guess, that it kind of was a natural inclination for me to end up in the language world.   Vasco: Yeah .Why Translation? I mean you always knew that … it seems so you write poems also that it's something that you do for a long time?   Silvia: I studied after college actually. I've always written and that was when it kinda got serious. I wanted to be an engineer, initially. That was my plan. I've always want to become a computer scientist. I wanted work with computers, to build stuff, and I did a bunch of that while in high school but I was extremely interested in both languages and history. So, one month before applying to … for college I faced this decision. Do I want to become an engineer, do I want to study linguistics or do I want to go for history which was also pretty passionate about. And in the end, the decision came easily. Translation was a fairly new degree in Spain at that time. It didn't exist before. I think at the time there were only five or six schools that offered it. And for me it was a door to the world.   Vasco: Did you say translation specifically in Spanish to English or?   Silvia: I was doing English, German and Russian, the languages that I was studying. And a lot of the focus was around the theory and practice of translation and interpreting. After my second year my goal was to become a UN interpreter. I don't know it may happen someday.   Vasco: Is that something you'd like to do?   Silvia: Yeah definitely. it's something that my dream and would definitely love to visit an interpreter’s booth maybe in the UN.   Vasco: Must be a very stressful job.   Silvia: Definitely. But I was trained to be an interpreter. That was my plan when I finished college. In Spain, at least last two years of your translation studies, you can … translation and interpreting studies you can specialize…   Vasco: Oh, because it's translation and interpreting studies?   Silvia: Yeah. So you can kinda focus on one or the other. I did both but with a very strong focus on interpreting and I think that it actually shaped my brain for translation or localization at fast speeds. Like localization for startups. You kind of need to change your mindset when … that's something that I alway say and it may sound unpopular but the translation industry I think needs to evolve a bit faster than it’s currently doing.   Vasco: That's a great topic because that was one of the questions that I had. Your thought in the field as a very progressive thinking person in localization and internationalization. Recently we were at Localization World, and I mean there was a panel you were in and it was fascinating because compared to the general field of localization, you’re kind of like way out there an kinda you know, pushing the boundaries forward. And what’s your position in terms of where the field is now, what the companies are doing, and where you think it's headed? You know, because I feel that one of the things we're seeing is exactly that mindset, as you identified, the  interpretation of fast moving kind of adapting to content where it needs to be versus stagnating around the content, and thinking of this as a craft and we need hours and hours to produce the perfect content.   Silvia: I think there's layers. When you think about localization in the online industry and for better or worse everything is moving to the online industry. Everything's available on every device at any time and that has shaped the way you develop products. One of my key priorities when thinking about how do I want to run localization was what does our development process look like? Is it agile? Are we shipping things every day? And the answer is yes we're shipping things every day so I cannot be the gatekeeper and say ok this will be waiting a month from now and when it's ready at the same time in all the languages that we offer. And that has always been a personal frustration of mine that localization and translation is always perceived as the gatekeeper. It doesn’t necessarily need to be that way. I feel that this fast-paced development has given us a tool or has equipped us with the right mindset to start pushing the limits as opposed to saying we okay, we need to come up with this perfect process where it will provide a final product and we won't be touched. Luckily right now, fixing a bug is not a 4 week process. A localization bug can be fixed in a couple of hours.   Vasco: Did you find that … so when you got to Pinterest for example, did you find that … that was because the development process was already in place such as you were pushing things everyday or were you thinking about that even before the developmment process was like that? So like, my point being, if you were a smaller company, I see this a lot in startups nowadays is, even though it seems like it should be easier and easier for a company to be able to internationalize earlier, there's a lot of startups that delay it. Especially that first initial effort to for example localize a website into one language. It's always the hardest part. Once that happens it's kinda easier to work to go two languages then it's a nightmare to manage more than a few languages. But it seems like it's still happening too late. I wonder if part of that is because the deployment process itself, the pushing you code, new features, it's a little bit messier than in a company like Pinterest where things are probably a little more organized and kind of more scheduled.   Silvia: I feel that … going back to the … should companies or startups start thinking about going international earlier, the answer is definitely yes. I would say that localization is optional but internationalization is not. So the moment you start writing code you need to start thinking about internationalizing your code. Making sure that you're following best practices, that things would be readily available in the future and there's tons of documentation out there to make things right and eventually you can turn on the switch at any point and start localizing and start shipping that first language and that should be a significantly easier experience if you didn’t think about internationalizing your code. Besides then it’s going to mean that you need to rewrite everything and that's something that no one wants to do.   Vasco: Yeah. You know what … it's funny because I think every startup you talk to, for example, knows this right? If you ask them like shouldn't you know get your code ready or something? "Oh sure, of course, it is very important." But somehow most people when doing this for the first time they'll realize that you know, even when they thought they did a good job that there's a lot of strings missing that there's a lot of things weren't ready.   Silvia: I think that's going to happen that's where pseudo localization or even machine translation can help a ton because you can create dummy versions and that's how … I start my process. Basically, if we need to translate something new or localize a new site up, anything, is … first thing you need to do is run it through pseudo localization and see what your missing. That's the first place where you do a round of QA. To say okay where are the gaps. And these things can be fixed, for me, easily. If you got them right early on your localization bugs are not blockers. It's really strange that you'll be at a point where internationalization bugs will be stopping your development.   Vasco: That's a good point. For example, what I’ve noticed and going through it with our own website and we do translation so and it should be easier for us and still hard. And I think part of the thing that I realize it that the required information like for example what you just said you know … you should first run pseudo localization to understand where the gaps are that information is not collated in to one place. There's no user guide for you know how to internationalize or localize your website there's simply parts of it. You have this, well if you’re in Django generate the PO files, right? But then there's no one that you need to figure that oh yeah doing internationalization on your URLs and making sure that they're ready for different domains that's a different part. And how do you SEO on that, that's a different part. And oh by the way, before you even translate do pseudo localization that's a different part. So I think there's some resources missing that make it very easy like … Ok, you wanna localize your website? Here's really the steps you need to do from end to finish. I think I find that, especially because every time the company starts thinking about localization, it's never their core. you know. It's never their focus. It's something that they see as something as this can bring us growth. But it's not something that the CEO or whoever it is that's doing is stopping … is voluntarily stopping to do this. Like, well, gotta get this done and what's the easiest and cheapest way of doing it?   Silvia: Yeah I think that's … I don’t want to say a wrong mindset, or dangerous mindset, because what you want is growth, then you need to think about international. Because the US population or the English speaking population or the whatever, the German or Russian whatever language your app or website or service is originally in, is finite. Like, you'll hit the ceiling pretty soon. But if you internationalize it then, adding extra languages it's somewhat trivial. The hardest part is the beginning. Once you’re you can add more languages you can add more markets. It's fairly easy to go on with that process but if you think about limiting it to the US or English or any language you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to growth. You really need to … you need to think big. You never know. You probably won't start to localize into 20 languages in week two, you need to be ready to do it if it happens. You don’t want to wait five years.   Vasco: That's a great segue. How do you know? Like … You're starting a month, you look for different markets and you think ok maybe I've done my products in English or maybe I should do it in Chinese or Russian or something someplace where I think the market is big. But there's ton of different languages, you know. How do you go about it? Like how do you pick. Pinterest now is in 31 languages that’s amazing. But how did it happen? Was it completely planned or was it more, well, we are gonna try different markets and then you see some metrics and you decide based on that?   Silvia: So, I think and this is not Pinterest specific but for every, any company is what do you care about? Like what is the core of your business and how does that resonate with different markets? Is it ads that you care about? Like, what's the most interesting ad markets. I use something as specific service that can resonate specifically with a given demograpic and a given market. Are you in the apps downloads business and you have a social app that would be especially attractive to any market? Something that I find interesting these days is that aside from research that you would be doing is users are already telling you what are the most interesting market. Because you will see your product resonate more with a given demographic and a given market and that’s happening organically right now.   Vasco: Ok. So basically you’re saying you get your product in English for example, and there's gonna be some traction in some demographics even if it's in English and then you look at them and see well it seems like there's already some interesting tractions here before you actually localize it to the local language then we can actually grow. You're saying that it's about the product fitting that market and then making it even better by presenting it in that one language.   Silvia: Yeah. Unless you have a specific interest in a given market. There's a reason why you want to be in Europe. Then of course you want to focus there and if you have no possibility in working in Argentina or Latin America in general I wouldn’t prioritize Spanish. Because it's, yeah of course you may have traction right now but if it's not something you're really interested in it's not the smartest idea to put your effort there, while you could be focusing on France and Germany maybe because that's where the core of your business will be 3 years from now. So, it's kind of like making the decision of what do I care about? Or what does my business care about? And where will I find that product market fit?   Vasco: I think that it's very interesting because one of the challenges that I feel that most people either in any from the local to international line is finding … Well assuming if you are at this stage and you have product market fit, is then how do you identify eaerly signs of that helping determine first internationalize into and once you’ve done that what was the ROI on that? So what was the … maybe sometimes it's easy. For Pinterest, I imagine that you guys, once you deploy the language, you’ll see an uptick in growth. You’ll see someway like is there any specific metrics that you look at to say that yes this was worth it, let’s invest more here.   Silvia: So going back to the first part of the question, I think there’s two approaches you can be reactive or proactive. Going back, if you see that you’re getting a lot of the traction in a given country and if that’s a fit you should totally go for it. Or you can say, ok, I’m really interested in the Russian market. I’m going to put my efforts behind it and make sure that I'm getting all the benefits I can. Going back to how do you measure the ROI of localization. That's the million dollar question. Everyone's asking it. And it's the same question for a lot of disciplines. What is the ROI of social media, what's the … In the case of localization, there’s a lot of ways to look at it. First, you can can just look at what's the growth in general. It’s going to tell you was this worth it. And I see more growth, which you’ll probably see because offering a product in the language of the end user is going to give you benefits in different ways. So, you will increase the activation of the user. The users will more likely to understand the product but understand what they can do with it, engage more with it. It’s also more discoverable. Say you got the benefit from the local SEO you get the added benefit of more awareness because you are speaking your customers' language.   Vasco: Yeah. Of course.   Silvia: Yeah. Kind of basic but …   Vasco: Do you feel over time, I mean, you’ve been doing this you know at least at two different companies and more actually but, do you feel that it’s gets easier this conversation? Where nowadays if you go to whoever the decision maker of which language to go to, that it becomes more of a no-brainer? It’s like, yeah of course we need to be in multiple languages. It's more of a matter of do we have resources deploy it rather than do we want to do it? Or do you feel that it’s still a struggle to explain this and make this point of ROI. Will this question of what's the ROI become obsolete?   Silvia: Hopefully yes, it will become obsolete. One metric that I found has helped me a lot to say okay this is the ROI, because when no languages have the same ROI. Not all markets have the same ROI. So that’s when you need to back to what metrics do I care about or work metrics does my business care about. Because you can look at it from the growth standpoint. You can look at it from the revenue standpoint. What you want to map is your cost of localization per user to the metric you care about. So it’s like cost of localization per monthly active user in the market, cost of localization per pageview in that language. Whatever it is that you care about, those are two metrics that you should map and interestingly you’ll see that it's a decreasing curve and in some cases will start tends to zero. Which is good. If it tends to zero, it means that there’s definitely an ROI there. And that’s also a metric that … for people who have an established business in many languages it can also help you make decisions. If I need to cut down a language because we are not getting any ROI on that language, then you can easily see what that language would be. We talked about scaling localization, increasing the international footprint but there’s also a point where you need to scale back. And doing that …   Vasco: Does that happen often? That’s very interesting. Usually we think of internationalization as always growing, as moving forward. Does that happen that you feel like, well, this was great but it’s not working as we thought, let's rethink our strategy?   Silvia: I don’t think it happens very often but it definitely happens. And I think it’s a very smart move to see it coming and make the decision of, hey, we need to stop investing in this particular market or this particular language. Because at the end of the day it may not be the right moment, it may not be the right strategy at the time. I mean if can create a model that reduces your localization costs, there’s generally going to be an upside in offering a language even though that offering may be extremely limited. For example if you have your app but you don't have anything else. You don’t have customer support, you don’t have any additional resources. Just a mobile app. Honestly, three thousand words is not a ton of money.   Vasco: Right and I’ve been seeing that in apps, it seems to be more of a no-brainer to do it earlier because there’s less amount of words and there’s more of an impact of having your app translated into a particular language enables you to have a better ranking in the market place for example in the app store of that country. If you don’t, users will complain. So there’s more of a direct impact that you can see immediately and there’s lower effort. So it seems like there’s more people that’s starting to localize their apps earlier and that leads to everything else. Which kinda leads to my next question which is when it’s not just about localizing your website of course there’s all this other collateral that you’re not incurring and it’s a little bit of a feature debt. Because it’s not only up there in the website but then there’s custom service, knowledge basis and you know, marking materials, and sales material so on and so forth. How do you manage all that? Because doing in 31 languages seems like quite a challenge.   Silvia: Yeah so that’s where a tiering system for languages. I always like to say that all languages are created equal but that’s not always true. I would love for that to be a reality. For us, my main priority is to offer our core product in every language. For every platform.   Vasco: When you say core product, do you mean like app or websites?   Silvia: Pinterest. Both. Like. Everything, every language, every platform at the same time. So doing simultaneous shipping is really a priority of mine. I always stick to that principle as much as we can. I mean or course there’s always features that may not be available internationally for various reasons but I would say that 95% of what we ship ships everywhere. And then there’s all the rest. So right now we do have countries where we have people on the ground that have different needs in terms of …   Vasco: Do you produce specific contents for those countries?   Silvia: Yes. We’ll produce specific content or translate specific content for them that we are not translating for other markets. But when it comes to customer support or resources for businesses we try to be as comprehensive as possible in our offering and translate them to every language. So make sure that we are helping international users get support in their language.   Vasco: Right! And in the case of Pinterest, I mean it's really a love brand. As far as I can tell, your users love Pinterest. There’s this huge rise of goodwill that oh everything related to Pinterest is always amazing. And does that help? Does that mean that it’s even more important to be in their own language or do you feel that it actually enables Pinterest to not to care so much in a sense that your users will make more of an effort to understand Pinterest?   Silvia: Actually for us, putting Pinners first is one of our core values and it’s something we want to do and offering Pinterest in the user’s language is an acute priority for us as a company. Something that I always like to clarify is that we don’t translate pins themselves. We just translate the skeleton of the platform. The content is decided by all the users all over the world. But making sure that everyone has the content they need about or where they need it is acute priority to make the experience great.   Vasco: Would you like to? Let’s say that there was an easy way to translate all the pins but the ability to do that wasn’t an issue. Is that something that you think would be useful?   Silvia: I think that in the case of Pinterest the magic of it is that it’s … so we have over 30 billion pins curated and organized by users. It’s a mind-blowing number. And the magic is that the users all over the world have handpicked that content and pinned it to the system. So I think yeah of course that would be useful for some people but I think where the magic is we can have content from any country, any language, all curated by users.   Vasco(outro): That’s it for the first part of Episode 2. Thanks for listening. I’m your host Vasco Pedro and be sure to listen to part 2 to learn more about how Silvia thinks about feedback, how difficult it can be to localize a consumer product in Japan and her unique perspective on how content is changing people’s brains. See you next time on Reach.

Summary Laura Gomez has had an amazing career. Starting out in international campaign management at AKQA, she moved on to help Google manage its Ad Operations in Asia Pacific and Latin America. In September 2009, she landed at Twitter moving from International Support to Head of Twitter español, to Head of Localization and eventually to Jawbone to Lead International for them. Since Jawbone, Laura has founded two companies, Vyv (former) and Aptica (current), both of which are accesibility-focused. Episode 1 Transcript Vasco: So today we’ve got with us Laura Gómez. She has a very impressive resume as Twitter - so as Twitter you grew the community of international volunteers from 1,600 to a million?   Laura: Yes.   Vasco: In less than two years which is really, really impressive. After Twitter you were at Jawbone, right?   Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: Where you led all international products, product management, internationalization, (and the) localization effort. Jawbone is a love brand so people really like that. I remember talking to you at the time and [about] all the efforts you were doing on Jawbone which were really impressive.    And you were featured in hundreds of publications, I mean you are everywhere. I mean, [in] 2013 you were voted one of the most powerful women in Mexico, that's very impressive, and as far as I can tell you were the first in your family to graduate from college, right? Which is. . .   Laura: Yes.   Vasco: So, I mean it seems like you've been always immersed in this moving forward, of achieving more and being involved in communities, right? Of moving people.   Laura: Yes.   Vasco: How did it get started? Did you know early on, like, "I want to work with these great communities?"   Laura: Well, I remember being here, my family came to the United States when I was about nine, ten. Then I grew up in Silicon Valley. So, I tell people I learned how to drive at the Napster parking lot.   Vasco: Okay, that's awesome.   Laura: My first internship was [with] Hewlett-Packard Software at 17. It was just kinda funny because I was like, "I don't want to do this," because this was literally maybe a year or two years, or the year that Google was founded, when consumer software hadn't really caught on and all software was PC based, not even Apple [was popular], it was all PC based. When I was in high school I remember there was this proposition against immigrants, Cal Prop 187 and I remember I was doing very well in school and then I gathered a whole [group of] students to march on a rainy day against that when it passed. And obviously it was overturned by the courts because it was unconstitutional, saying that immigrants couldn't go to school or couldn't go to hospitals, like all of that.    So, anyway I realized, like, I had this motivation, this kind of talent to gather people in a collective vision and explain, you know, whether it's a protest or a march or later on, on a product. And I think that's one of the things that I feel very passionate about - always thinking [of] the power of the community. For example, I remember going to Localization World Paris 2012, and I had the professional translators always attack[ing] the community model that we were building at Twitter, but I was always saying, you know, collective thought, and as long as you can help them with the right tools, it's always better than a one thought, right? So, like when you have collectiveness.    Vasco: That's a great point, I mean, so maybe one of the first things I would love to discuss is exactly the perspective from professional translators to community translation, I mean you're kind of leading, well I know you're now doing a different project within a community but you've been leading for a long time, this idea of pushing community forward, and community tasks specifically, in localization. How was the perception of translators regarding the community? How did that evolve over time? Do you think that's changing?   Laura: Well, I think it is, I think it's the power of the community. Like the power of crowdsourcing, regardless — I know Luis von Ahn who did the crowdsourcing of the capture, right?   Vasco: Right.   Laura: And so looking at the power of crowdsourcing and that's Duolingo as far as how can you do that and do more on language learning. I don't think that, like, even when I went to Jawbone and I introduced this, our users [were] going to know our brand better or are going to understand [us] better. I do think that even when we started doing crowdsourcing on Twitter, I remember interviewing someone, a candidate, a professional to help us launch in one of the FIGS languages - French, Italian, German, Spanish. And I remember one candidate was actually, like, professional was like, "I hate, I don't think that they're trained." I was like, "Why are you interviewing for this job? Because this job will actually, you won't be the person to decide, it will be the community but you're the one that at the end, you know, reviews and makes the appropriate option for that translation." And I think even in 2012 and even as we move forward, like, now we're seeing more tools for translators to be better translators and communities to understand better, whether it's context, what they’re translating. And I think that now when you did crowdsourcing before, let's say in Facebook of 2008, It was just like, "Do this." And so people didn't have [the] appropriate tools to understand what they were . . .   Vasco: [Interjects] And how did you deal . . . I mean one of the things that typically is found in crowdsourcing and translation is, especially if people are volunteers, that it's hard to get them to do the more boring texts, right? People do what they love and some stuff gets . . . it's hard to predict when things are going to be done and when you can actually get ready to push. How do you coordinate that with what I imagine is a fast paced of pushing code and, kind of, pushing features at Twitter?   Laura: I think there has to be a balance, right? If you understand that your text, maybe this kind of more boring text is not going to get translated, you might have [to do] the pull itself, or the translations will be ten times less [quick] than like a “fun” translation, whatever that means. And it's all very subjective as well, [in] some languages that boring text can be fun. In Swedish people wanted to translate the longer, boring texts . . .   Vasco: Interesting.   Laura: . . . [more] than the shorter text because the shorter text is like, "Yeah, that makes sense but the longer I put my . . . " So I think it depends on the communities as well as [what else] you can always mix in. There's always a great balance between community and professional translators on what [one] can one do versus the other.   Vasco: Do you think that it's a spectrum where you have all kind of ranges of skill, or is it more [on] one side it's the community on [the] other side is the profession, or [is there] like a clear distinction?   Laura: No, I don't think so. I think there are people that are professional translators that volunteer on different platforms and you'd be getting paid for it. There are also people that started off doing community translations that decide, "I'm really good at it, I want to become a professional translator, or do it on other platforms."    For example, a great friend of mine who was part of the community - mind you, the community to me is almost like an extended family especially the people that moderate it - when I went to Indonesia I actually met one of our community [members] and he's my Facebook friend now, I call him my brother, my Indonesian brother. You do meet, like, someone from the Arabic community that started doing this translation for Twitter that ended up doing the same for like, WhatsApp, and then I'm doing the same for Pinterest. There are other things - not Pinterest but for Airbnb - so there are other things that people are doing and so I think it's really cool that there's no spectrum, it's always like, you know, what is the right blend of people that are doing this? I do think that in general the communities [themselves], they're cohesive with each other if it's like this is something they're either a) getting paid on or b) “I’m learning to understand.” And there's always that fine balance. I've met at Localization World, my professional translators people in head of localization of very big companies that are still, you know, tackling the same issues. I always tell people that Localization World at least to me was always like a very big group therapy.   Vasco: Yes, so I went to my first Localization World in October, in Vancouver.   Laura: Oh, okay, cool.   Vasco: And I felt exactly that, I felt like, until then we, there were a lot of issues that we thought, "Okay, it must be just us, the rest of the people have already solved this."   Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: But then you get there and it's like, "Oh wait, everybody's kind of struggling with the same issues," and there's kind of a set of current issues that everybody's trying to figure out, and it's more like, "Oh, you know, clients, they always want the weirdest things." And it's like, "Oh, you too? It happened to us too."   Laura: Yeah. I tell you it's like group therapy that you end up going to, you're like, "Okay great." And it's great because I think this community understands and always is thinking, whether now my new venture is a different community, it's not a consumer web, and it's really led to actually make an impact. Yet I'm always having my localization international hat on, like, when I speak to partners, or when I'm talking to someone I was like, "Are we going to be able to localize or internationalize this?" So our passion is always there.   Vasco: That's an interesting point, so now I mean, you have this tremendous experience in building and running and kind of expanding internationalization in large and medium companies, and now you're kind of doing, you know, you're a new start-up founder. How early did you think about this, right? Is this something that you said, "Well this is great but even knowing how hard it is to do things I'm going to postpone it a little bit." Or is this something like, "No, I want to be in multiple markets from day one."   Laura: Yeah, and so, I think that's a great question. The start up that I cofounded that is still running strong with my ex co-founder, there we thought about internationaliz[ing] from the point one, I said, "Can we do this in Spanish and English?" Spanish we can reach Latin America or whatever. So from the get-go, and even now as people are asking me, "Is this going to be just a US-based?" Obviously when you have a company and you want to start off, obviously like US companies you need a validation, but I said, "No, we might want to do the same."    A typical talent is everywhere, it doesn't just defined by the 30 miles that is Silicon Valley, or anywhere. You might find great Ruby programmers in this northern state of Mexico, or you might find great Perl programmers in this part of Greece. So, I feel like connecting those dots of like, it's something that really, really resonates with me. So, one day an engineer or a product manager or a sales person from Greece, let's say, wants to work in Silicon Valley. They understand the process where we'll be able to speak to them in their native tongue, and then say “But prepare your English for the interview.” Obviously I think about how we are going to internationalize not only the user interface, but like the learning lessons, everything that we want for things to be. There's a lot of terminology, as you know, here in Silicon Valley, but how can we explain that terminology to someone that's not in Silicon Valley?   Vasco: Right.   Laura: That speaks another language. And so I want to be able to do that at one point and then kind of expand on what diversity means in technology, what diversity means in the workforce, what diversity means in general. You know women, raised nationality etc, age. I think it's really important to think about from the beginning because I never want to be an US-based . . . I don't want to be a US focused, maybe US-based, and then having, but always thinking about the potential and international market.   Vasco: Great so there's two questions I'd like to ask. One is going back to the community building and Twitter and the experience you had there. From what you said, you believe in people growing as translators, right? So that even someone that is beginning you can give them materials or you can educate them to become better, right?   Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: Can you mention, what kind of materials would you give someone? Because sometimes there's this dichotomy between well, either you're focusing between people learning languages or it's more like, well you either know it or you don't, but you’ve got to be able to do the job. What would you use, what would you recommend? If someone is trying to educate the community.   Laura: I think one is an assessment of any community, we are doing the same now in [unclear], how do we assess where they're at as as far as like . . . You know a language, like, for example, you put me in the middle, hopefully, in Portugal or Brazil, I speak enough Portuguese that I can probably survive. And everything comes back to me, right? But if I'm doing this online, maybe my assessment is not reflective as well as what I should be doing, this translation. But if you assess, understand, that this is something I'm passionate about. Passion drives forward, maybe a learning lesson with content on very basic things that you would be of knowledge to me like, how do you say "restroom"? Or how do you say, "My name is . . ." or how do you say, "I want to have a ticket on this bus to this place." And so all of those things, right? You assess that and you understand that from me but I may not be able to have a long conversation in that language. And so you place people and then you, to a certain extent, you see their motivation [as] action based. I think it's really important to know that, like, most people outside of the United States are bilingual.   Vasco: Yeah.   Laura: Like, an example is [unclear] my Indonesian moderator translator that worked at Twitter that I met when I was in Bali. And that I promised that I would go back to visit him, actually and as an excuse . . .   Vasco: It's a great excuse.    Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: There could be worse places to go.   Laura: Yeah, I know. When he met me, he's like, "I'm so sorry for my English," and I was like, "I don't even know why you're apologizing." I bet you if I learned Indonesian, I'd probably be a hundred times worse. A lot of people are always apologetic over their, what we call their L2, their second language. We all have our egos, [over] the L1 the L2 sometimes. For me English has become L1 because now I work in and have [been] raised here in the United States that Spanish sometimes now is like a second language. The L2, we are always apologetic of that second language you have learned, and I don't think that we should be. Like, I think translators in themselves: if you have a capacity to communicate effectively in that language, you probably have the capacity to know enough to translate in it. So, like I think what becomes now is like, how can you get better at it? Maybe at the beginning you're probably not that great, like, but I bet you if you are constantly are doing it. . .   Vasco: So you think the most important thing is kind of the feedback loop of what you do and how good was that . . . ?   Laura: Yeah, the insights.   Vasco: Okay. So it's more that than, "Here's a library of videos that you should go watch . . . "   Laura: No.   Vasco: "On specific techniques on translation, for example?"   Laura: No, insights are always, like, everyone always . . . here we go with the Silicon Valley terms, big data, everyone's always talking data but data doesn't have to be big and it doesn't have to be complex, it just has to be insightful for people to understand. And that's why now almost everything has analytics attached to it, so we that understand at least where the patterns are at, what people [are] like. And then we don't have to overanalyze all of our things. I don't think I overanalyze my Twitter analytics, Facebook, just not even. It's more about what are insightful analytics for me? Like, for me, when I publish something on LinkedIn and then I see 40 people have your profile and that's great. That means that there's something effectively in my profile that is going to get me a) clients, b) investments or c) new friends in the field.   Vasco: So it's a little bit of a tangent but I think that's fascinating, right? Because I think big data is kind of powering a lot of the trends that we are seeing. For example, even machine translation is powered by all of the advances that have been powered by big data. But I think we're now moving to the moment where it's more about insightful data. So it's about so how do you . . . because it's overwhelming, right? The amount of data available is just overwhelming. You can't, for example, even simple things in a startup where you start measuring stuff and you start sending events to Mixpanel. And pretty soon you have way more events than you can handle, and you're trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I make sense of this?"    Laura: Which one makes sense?   Vasco: Exactly, right. And you can always find data, you know, you can basically tell whatever story you want with it. You can always highlight certain parts of the data to make your point, even if those two points are contradicting each other. You can both be supported by the same data, if you know how to tell the story. I think that the hard part is, how do you get insights from that data? Because even though we all like to think we are going to be amazing statisticians, we are not going to be, I'm not going to be, right? And at some point that's not the focus, right? The focus is you want to tell me what's relevant so I can make a decision on how to move forward and how to achieve my goals. And I think that's, kind of, a lot of the buzz AI words that we are seeing now are in one way or another trying to drive insights from data and kind of taking the next step.   Laura: What makes sense for, let's say we bring it back to localization, what makes sense, right? And as you said earlier, what's the boring text like? You understand the key terms of the UI or things that need to be translated and need to be understood. And even the boring text, we see five users that will end up using it, so maybe that effort of that insight that you're doing, it has to be translated. If it's so hidden that someone doesn't see it . . .   Vasco: That's actually a very interesting idea. In a way what you're saying is that the community itself is curating what content is going to be important just by basically there's an alignment between the content that the translators, the volunteers, want to translate and the content that users are going to respond to. Natively users are going to tend to translate the things that they think is going to be more interesting for the users, and so in a way they are already focusing on the content that is more important.   Laura: Yeah, you can rank that and ship. When I joined Jawbone I had to like, it was insane because it was already a couple hundred employees, yet they never had anyone dedicated, and so [were] like, you go back and try to reeducate people doing [unclear] and saying there's the things, because they always want completion and I was like, "If you have completion, you don't get context all around that copy and you don't have to think about the culture and itself?” Like, you're not going to have the best translation, right? Completion at the end of the day, like I remember, like we were, "It has to be 100% completed when we are launching on Twitter." Then we realized, it could be 90% completed - that is, user interface "long tail" content or the boring content. We will try to complete it within the next month. Obviously that doesn't look good and I know a lot of people would say, "No localization." But if we looked at the analytics, one out of a hundred users would end up in that page. We want the user growth to happen, so like, I think at the end of the day, obviously localization and translation, internationalization's all about growth. It's all about having that growth aspect, so, like whatever you do, a business wants to grow, consumer software wants more users. Everything is about growth. You have to just choose. Hardware is a little bit difficult because Jawbone, you have to have your directions . . .    Vasco: User manuals.   Laura: Yeah, user manuals, those are harder and obviously, like, you need to push, but I think with agile and consumer web and the online products you can probably leverage that a little, well you have much more room for flexibility.    Vasco: And one of the questions that keeps coming up again and again is, kind of, "Okay, how do we justify our ROI on localization, right?" I mean even internally how do you sell that, how do you go to the CEO or whoever is going to make the budget decision and say, "Hey, this is really important, this is how it's going to enable us to grow." In something like hardware, like you said, you need to have the manuals if you're going to launch in a particular market. But when you're localizing your website, how do you have that conversation?   Laura: I think, I don't know, I mean, I honestly . . . We launched in a couple of languages and I think the reason, at least on Twitter, I remember when I started I was just doing Twitter in Español and I was doing everything, from business development to localization to support. It was just me. And so a year later they're looking at . . .   Vasco: Fortunately Twitter doesn't have a lot of users, right?   Laura: Right.   Vasco: It's just 500,000 emails a day.   Laura: It wasn't even a year later, it was like I think eight months later I got promoted to the team lead and they're like, "How did you do this?" and I'm like, "I don't know." It's obviously Twitter ended up really being picked up in Latin America, and they're like, "Well, can that be replicated?" And I was like, "Well, we need to understand how we launch." When we launched for Turkey and for Twitter in Turkish, literally the growth was on onboarding and retention as people signed up, it was 40%, it increased by 40%.   Vasco: That's insane.   Laura: And those numbers . . . and I was at an event called Venture Crush - I'll invite you, they usually have them in June here in California, it's by my law firm - they have VCs and entrepreneurs and they're amazing, I've been to both Venture Crush in New York - I flew out there just for that and then here - and the people I've met there, it's just other entrepreneurs and the content that they discuss, it's very particular to start-ups and founders like you and I. But there was a whole panel of international, the head of growth for Facebook, there were a bunch of VCs, or venture capitalists for your listeners that don't know the Silicon Valley lingo, venture capitalists from all the big firms that have invested in all the big names that one knows of. And one of them actually is the former SVP of Engineering at Twitter who is at another venture capitalist firm, now as a partner. And I remember just saying hi to Mike and the whole conversation was about international and why don't we invest more in international localization. He was supposed to lead [the conversation] and he just started off saying, "Oh, Laura is here, she can actually . . . "   And I'm like, "No, I'm not, I'm here to listen to other people and what they . . ." and there were people from Pinterest, there were people from Facebook, there were more software as a service business to business start-ups and a lot of venture capitalists, and I think that conversation's happening, this was last year. And so there is no, "How can I go to my CEO?" I think if all their investors are having conversations around growth and growth naturally means you don't grow only in the United States, it means growth globally, you do have a business case for it. I've done business case for localization with different budgets, from budgets that I had at Jawbone to really little budgets I had on Twitter. My budget at one point was $1,000 and I just used it to print t-shirts to send to . . .    So, I think it's about the growth aspect, if your business is going to grow, you're going to get more clients, you're going to get more users. And everyone understands growth, and knows that growth is natural. Like you go and say, my business justification to translate into Spanish, Latin American Spanish is 300 million people that are in that region. Whether you're consumer web or you're business-to-business you have 300 million people and you have a client base that is all over this region. Or you say the same on the Indonesian market, Jakarta is called the Facebook capital of the world, because they have more Facebook users per capita than any other wealth. They're very connected, and at the beginning no one understood why I wanted to translate it into Indonesian. Now that they opened up the Indonesian office in Twitter, I'm hoping that they understand why I did this.    I do think that start-ups and US based companies don't understand the importance of localization whether you're in Silicon Valley, whether you're in Detroit, whether you're in Texas, as much as they should as international expansion, but that being said I do feel like people are understanding that you don't get to be the Twitters and the Facebooks of the world if you focus on, at least on the consumer world, focus only on the US. You can actually monetize way, way earlier than one could. Maybe you don't see the ROI right away, and I think that's another misconception that people have. We translated, why can't we see an ROI but you definitely are planting the seed. Once again, going back to Indonesia we planted that seed. Five years ago, no, it was 2011, I think, four years ago almost. And here we are, [inaudible 00:24:53], right? I'm not saying it takes years . . .   Vasco: But that's the average time it takes on an average start-up to actually grow, like if you just launched your product, three, four years is not uncommon for you to actually hit your stride and get to the point where you're getting big. So, in a way, when you're launching in a new market it's like you're launching the product anew, right?   Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: There's a certain aspect of it, you need to actually get it to grow.   Laura: And then you also need retention, right? Like, for example, like I believe that Twitter launched Twitter in Portuguese a little bit too late when the product was very popular in let's say, Brazil in 2008-2009 and then we launched, only three years ago, Twitter in Portuguese. And so you always have to, whether it's language based or culture based, I remember being at an event and someone came up to me and said, "My product . . . " It was an educational tech, "My product is really popular in the Middle East, what do I do?" and I was like, "Take advantage of it."    Vasco: Yeah, ride it.   Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: Ride the wave.   Laura: Yeah, I was, "Maybe not localize because we all know right-to-left languages are really . . ."   Vasco: Yes.   Laura: But like, get insights, get understanding on why. Maybe, like, gather ten users and ask them, and start promoting that. Have them become brand ambassadors of your product, because when other people are your evangelists that's where you get . . . you know I used this really cool product, parents or whoever, but don't try to dissect information when you grow in a certain market. I think, like, I understand what are the cost benefits of me translating or getting insightful data from them? It's definitely, as I said, insightful data could be, "Okay, maybe translating in Arabic is going to cost me too much, but getting more information and promoting it more might gathers users." Or, if it's an easier sell, like, more of a romance language like Spanish, maybe you should translate, it's a couple hundred dollars if you have a couple of . . .   Vasco: It's kind of low hanging fruit.   Laura: Yeah, if you don't have that much copy. It's all weighed in the balance but definitely take advantage of like, "Oh, why is it so big?" Japanese users for example, they're very particular about their localization and translation like Korean users, their thresholds of what feels native to them, it's a little bit more particular. But that didn't stop Twitter from growing in Japan. We used a weird mix of in-house site people that learned Japanese as an adult as well as professional translators that didn't understand Twitter. Cleaning up Twitter in Japanese was actually a bigger test than translating it because it happened before I arrived there, before we had dedicated team members. But that didn't stop Twitter from growing there . . .   Vasco: It's interesting because I keep hearing over and over that Japan is kind of a class by itself in terms of getting to that market and sort of the intricacies of the culture and the relationship between culture and language and the way that you express things is so different sometimes than you would in English that translation becomes a little bit hard, right? But in your case, and to your point is, well if the product is just universally appealing and it's that good, then you don't need to go all the way to be able to start getting traction, if you make it easier enough that people can interact with the product then, basically what you're saying is you're enabling the market to use the early adopters and in the case of Twitter, early adopters were significant.    Laura: Yeah, definitely. And I think that in general, when you're learning one language, two languages, three languages and you travel and you have this sort of global perspective that you see that in every aspect of your life and you see that a good product, regardless, you know, of how it came to you, that it's going to be appealing. And I think at the end of the day also what people don't understand is that, your biggest early adopters don't have borders, the internet does not have a border.   Vasco: Right.    Laura: So I always say that, whether you want it or not, the internet won't give you a clear [unclear]. Even me, I'm going into . . . for tech companies right now as far as building this solution for tech companies, but if, you know, a year from now I get a beverage company from India telling me, "I want to use . . . " I can't say no, like if opportunities are there, so always be aware of opportunities. I do think that as we are speaking, that there is a shift from thinking only the US to if you become a public company, like Twitter has done, your stakeholders, your shareholders, your audience is going to be entirely international, because there's only so much room for growth, in this country or in this language or like a small little country like Portugal, that has only a population this small, but Europe and the Americas and Asia have a lot more. So, I do think that it's important to always think globally, even if you are not just right away going to act globally.   Vasco: We are all focused a lot of times in the US market, but you're right, a lot of the big opportunities are actually coming from other countries.   Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: Or in places that aren't quite as developed yet, and there's this huge opportunity there to just have traction earlier than you would if you're struggling, if you're competing in the US with ten other people.   Laura: Yeah, and I think, I mean unfortunately our biases is that we feel like the US market is going to validate, you know?   Vasco: Exactly, exactly and we are also here, it's comfortable, we get validated by the people around us, and by the people that can immediately, maybe we are also looking for immediate feedback. We can immediately see the impact, we can go next door and show it to a person and they say, "Yeah, this is awesome. I love this product," or, "I don't." While if you're doing it to the other side of the world and you're not there, maybe there's basic human interactions that really benefit from being there.   Laura: Yeah, definitely. But I think to your point you might get traction, you will get a lot more insights and you will get a lot of enthusiasm coming from a market that is still not tackling this issue. I always think about the Laura that would have been, if my family would have stayed in Mexico or my family would have decided, "Let's migrate to Ohio and not Silicon Valley." Where would I be now? What Laura . . . ? There's every opportunity you have here so . . .    Vasco: I think you'd still be moving huge communities. I believe that your passion for things would still be driving towards the kind of things you're doing.   Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: So I had one final question. Do you have any resources that you'd recommend people, like if you're building a community or if you're trying to go global, are there blogs that you follow, are there people that you think, "Hey, look at this case or this person, they did it really well." Obviously I recommend that people look at what you've done because it's been very impressive, but I wonder if you have any other recommendations?   Laura: Yeah, I think in general, reach out to as many people as you can. There's this amazing book by Nataly Kelly called "Found in Translation", there's excerpts out there, I think even some parts of the book, maybe the whole book is online, I don't know. But there's a lot of passionate people on Twitter or that are blogging about languages of an international . . . I think another thing that people, I think that resources tap into what other people have done, don't try to replicate it. We didn't try to replicate, to redo the wheel at Twitter, we looked at Facebook and it works for Facebook. They were able to localize in 80 languages in less than, like, I don't know, nine months? You don't want to reinvent the wheel, obviously crowdsourcing worked for them. I do have to say proudly that WhatsApp took our model as well . . .   Vasco: Oh okay, awesome.   Laura: . . . and did a translation center and everything, so like all this other stuff are doing, and there's a lot, for anyone who's doing this or is an engineer, that is open source on GetHub, on all this information. Try to learn more about cultural sensitivity and things that are actually implemented into the process like a lot of people, it's funny when I tell people about CLDR and they're like, "What is that?" and I'm like, "Dude, it's used by every single big company, your iPhone, all the way to Google." It's called Custom Locale And Data Repository. So what happens is that our languages, you know, in English, we just have one plural and one singular, all right? I have one book, I have two books, three books, four books. Books, that's it. But in other languages it is so fascinating you have different variations in Russian and you have all these different ways that you can actually pluralize. And so like, Custom Locale And Data . . . and so people don't know, I don't know Russian but I know this from learning.    And so I think it's important to understand getting to say in your framework, what are the things that I can do? To start, even if I can't I translate, can I actually make something culturally sensitive, at least? When we translated Twitter in right-to-left languages, we didn't translate the UI because we knew that'd take up bigger . . . But we started looking at how we rendered hashtags. Maybe this hashtag needs to go right-to-left, instead of . . . those are the incremental steps that would get you highly engaged and that will get you at least, if you're a hardware product and you can't translate everything, do you want to just put a sticker and say, "This is what it is." Or, minimize it as iPhone has successfully done, is like, pretty much their packaging is, just iPhone, a picture, and maybe something in the back, that adheres to that market's legal compliance and that's about it.   Vasco: Right, very minimalist.   Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: And that helps, right? Sometimes I notice that even in terms of copy, people tend to use a lot of idiomatic expressions which sometimes work really well in a language, but then you try to translate it and it sucks.    Laura: Yeah.   Vasco: And then it goes back to the whole question of, "Well, is it the translators fault? Or is it the fact that your content was terrible to begin with in terms of being ready for internationalization?" Or you weren't able to convey the context. Realizing definitely would help.   Laura: Or even saying, like, Volkswagen is a great example. They couldn't translate "Das Auto", so they kept it in all those languages. And so now people learned at least one German word, they understood. So I think it's like a balance what makes sense for your business, your brand, your company and your users, your clients. So, if you can strike that fine balance, who knows you might end up being one of those very successful start ups or companies that we all hear of.   Vasco: Which I'm sure yours will be.   Laura: I hope so too, thank you so much. Thanks everyone.   Vasco: Thank's very much Laura Gómez, I won't forget it now   Laura: Yeah, and definitely hope to meet you again, when you're back here in SF and always you have a friend in me and localization translation is one of the most amazing spaces to be in because it is truly universal and people can understand what you need to do in order to get there and it's all over the world, it's not confined just to a specific area. Definitely to all my localization international translation friends out there, you are changing the world, literally.   Vasco: Awesome, thank you very much.   Laura: Thanks, okay bye bye.   Vasco: Bye.