The Significance of Context in Translation with Andrzej Nedoma

Andrzej: Starbucks has this possibility to send them your idea for improvement of whatever it is: the process, the product, whatever you like or don't like about Starbucks that other users can vote on. So you are invited to understand this subject better, and probably since this is ranked so highly by the community, you know this is important and probably you should include this in your roadmap.

Brian: Today we are talking with Andrzej Nedoma from nedoma.io. Andrzej is the co-founder and former CEO of XTRF Management Systems, a global translation management platform provider for translation companies, in-house corporate language departments, and public organisations. His company helped hundreds of translation and localisation agencies in over 30 countries leverage their potential. He has been building his translation industry expertise since 1996. In 2021, he sold XTRF to K1 Investment Management. Now Andrzej supports various businesses and entrepreneurs worldwide as a business advisor, mentor, and accountability partner. He speaks four languages fluently and is also a triathlete competing in Ironman events. Andrzej, welcome to The Native Experience.

Andrzej: Hello, Brian, and welcome to everyone.

Brian: Tell us about yourself, what you do, and what you do for fun.

Andrzej: It is a long story related to the language and localisation industry. I started somewhere in 1991 when I was 12 years old and my father started his translation business. I was growing up within our apartment where he was delivering translations as a freelance translator, then building his small company. I joined him full-time in 2002. That was when I really started to work in the industry, building the translation company called Lidlang. As we were growing the business, we realised how technology is important to operate smoothly and quickly for our clients. So we needed technology, and that is how XTRF management system was initiated.

Andrzej: Since selling the companies, lots of entrepreneurs come to me and say, can you help us grow internationally, build the organisation, attract investors, sell the business? Quite naturally, I became a consultant, a mentor, a coach to other executives and business owners. I truly love sharing my experience to the benefit of others.

Andrzej: Triathlon is a big part of my life. Swimming, cycling, and running. It keeps my brain active and relaxed, which helps in business and private life. Sport is a facilitator for both worlds. In a week from now, I am participating in the first race this year.

Brian: I love how you combine the discipline from racing with business. The endurance, the grit. If you could only speak one language for the rest of your life, which would it be?

Andrzej: I speak Polish, English, Italian, French, and a little bit of Spanish. Which of them gives me access to more people? Probably English is the winning one. It gives me the capability to speak to many people wherever I go.

Brian: When you travel, you can see how people open up when you start speaking their language. If you could live in any country, which one?

Andrzej: That is a tough one. We are linked with so many things: family, school, children, friends. But I need sunshine, the sea, and mountains. I love skiing. So I would go for Italy. I lived there for half a year and really loved it. It is a second home country for me. There is much more sun than in Poland.

Brian: Have you ever encountered a word or phrase that does not directly translate?

Andrzej: So many. I used to work as a translator in my early days. Each time someone wants to be funny and you have to translate it, you know it does not translate directly. You cannot translate jokes or certain expressions. You can have another joke or describe something that matches the intentions of the speaker. But I was not good at that. That is why I always thought being a translator was not really for me. I was more passionate about growing business, sales, meeting clients, speaking at conferences.

Brian: What is your favourite foreign language film or book?

Andrzej: When I had to travel to Croatia, over a thousand kilometres, I played the audiobook by David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me. It kept my attention for 12 hours. Unbelievable.

Brian: Can you share some interesting cultural customs or traditions from your country or community?

Andrzej: There is a tradition for foreign languages in my family. My grandfather spoke eight or ten languages. My father grew up in this tradition of wanting to communicate in the language of the person you meet, to make the encounter comfortable. I loved seeing my grandfather do it. I loved seeing my father do it. Try to speak the language of the person you meet. It is not very Polish, but it is very much a Nedoma tradition. It shaped my career, my drive to meet people, to travel, to be international.

Andrzej: From traditions I encounter when travelling, I love those relating to cuisine and the table. When I started travelling to France, Italy, and Belgium, I realised how natural it is to match wine with food. It is not about drinking alcohol. It is about enriching the taste and all the senses. When I was recently in Portugal, the tables finished with azulejos tiles, the seafood, the olives, the wine, eating outside in the garden. I love these types of family gatherings in a sunny, cheerful atmosphere accompanied by fantastic food and wine.

Brian: Here in the United States, we are seeing traditions and cultural customs dissipate. It is sad because these things shape us and are worth celebrating.

Andrzej: Certain habits that become traditional mark a certain rhythm of life. A Sunday lunch or dinner can mark a special moment every week. They bring peace and equilibrium because we grew in this. At the same time, I love appreciating other traditions. Sometimes traditions can be contradictory to each other. It is important to have respect. If we open up and want to meet people in their countries and homes, we can appreciate how they pass life and mark time.

Brian: Tell us about your time studying in Italy through the Erasmus programme.

Andrzej: I had the luck of participating in one semester of studies in Bergamo, north of Italy. Fantastic place, very close to the Alps. I could take my skis and go skiing in half an hour. It was a fantastic international experience. Most students were from other countries. I would not say it was purely about studying. Probably there was much less studying than socialising and understanding other stories and lives.

Andrzej: The biggest discovery was that I went there feeling so lucky, coming from Poland for half a year in Italy. And there I met people who had been studying in the UK, then teaching English in Kuwait, then going to Australia or visiting Nepal. They were living a truly international life. I realised that what for me was already a big achievement, for others it was the basics. It opened my eyes to lots of possibilities.

Brian: You speak Polish, English, Italian, French, and a bit of Spanish. How has speaking multiple languages impacted your life and perspective?

Andrzej: Very much. Language is the tool I use to communicate with people and open them up. If you go to France and speak French, even if it is not perfect, they see the effort. They open up. People become very open, helpful, friendly, willing to suggest what you should see or invite you somewhere. Even in Southern California, speaking to hotel staff in Spanish creates an immediate bond. You can have a wonderful meeting with a person who just serves you coffee.

Andrzej: It is not a business goal. As a human, you want to be friendly. Knowing more languages gives you more chances to create a bond, which totally changes the experience of the place.

Brian: Let us talk about XTRF. What was the first market or language you started with outside the original language of the product?

Andrzej: The original language was English. We never did it in Polish. It started as an international product. Then we added the major European languages: Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Russian. Poland was not really a particular market for us. 95% of our clients were international. We looked at languages through the same lens: how many people does it give the software access to?

Andrzej: We also distinguished what we were localising. Our main users were translation companies who were comfortable with English or other major languages. But their clients were corporates from lots of different industries. So we knew we had to translate the customer portal into many more languages than the main interface. We translated the customer portal into about 20 languages, while the main interface was in eight or ten.

Brian: Do you have a specific example of how you incorporated localisation when entering a new market?

Andrzej: The system was prepared for localisation from the beginning. The text is put in a separate file with all the messages and menu names. The code calls for the text and indicates which language to display. That part was not difficult for us.

Andrzej: The harder question was how to provide context to translators. The menu is composed of one-word function names. If your translator is not a user of the system, how will they know what each item means? We organised trainings for our translators. Later, we created partnerships with our users. We would select from the pool of users someone who could become our linguistic partner: at least one partner who lives and works in the country that uses the language we want to translate to. This was the key to successful localisation, because the translator also knew the product as an end user.

Andrzej: It was also the trigger for some language versions. If we had an important client who needed a specific interface translated for their customers, whether Latvian, Estonian, or another less frequent language, we would say, can you become our partner for that? Both sides were incentivised. We wanted to win the client. The client wanted the language version for their customers. Both motivated to do it quickly and to great quality.

Brian: How did you balance the needs of different international markets while ensuring products were globally successful?

Andrzej: You have to understand whether specific requirements come from one particular client or represent a need for the whole country. Invoicing or tax regulation, for example, is country-specific. Whatever client you get in Italy, there is a specific way to produce invoices. When we see an idea that describes a need for a promising country with many potential clients, those ideas are ranked higher.

Andrzej: When we started building software, we wanted to be kind to everyone and accept all ideas. But very soon you get so many requests that you can never finish them. You have to start managing ideas. The example we used was from Starbucks. They let users submit ideas for improvement that other users can vote on. You can structure all ideas in a ranking. Some nobody comments on. Others spark discussions. When an idea is ranked highly by the community, you know it is important.

Andrzej: The question is how much of your roadmap you devote to community ideas versus your own vision. Starbucks has hundreds of thousands of ideas and implements maybe 10 or 20. It is a tiny portion. But listening to customers and paying attention to which ideas indicate something valid for a whole country or region is important. It can become your competitive advantage.

Brian: When you engage the community, sometimes they produce questions or suggest directions you would not have thought of.

Andrzej: Exactly. And sometimes someone from the community will say, look, you should look at this from another perspective. The situation gets resolved without your direct participation, which is much easier from a customer management perspective.

Brian: What do you think the future of translation looks like?

Andrzej: There are so many technologies popping up related to deep learning, machine translation, and AI. Machine translation already impacts how translations are produced. For many years, we heard examples of bad machine translation. But recently, machine translation is pretty good. We accepted that for some business goals, a text translated by machine is okay. If you just want to understand whether something in Chinese is a recipe or a business report, machine translation does a great job.

Andrzej: We can incorporate machine and humans in the same process. Machine translation does the first step, then humans do the proofreading and editing to bring it to a high quality level. The machine does it much faster. The proofreading may be more difficult because machines make different types of mistakes than humans. But the total output is produced faster.

Andrzej: With ChatGPT, we have to decide whether we translate or generate content in different languages. GPT can generate content in French if you ask it to. We might see less translation and more copywriting adaptation of content already produced in many languages.

Andrzej: Will the traditional way of doing translations still work in five or ten years? I don't think so. But will the world need humans to participate in multilingual content creation? That is for sure. We are using the term differently now. We don't talk about translations. We talk about multilingual communication, multilingual content. It can incorporate lots of processes and tools. As long as we talk about multilingual communication rather than just translation, we are open to including different professions and tools in this task.

Andrzej: There will still be a lot of involvement by humans. The needs are growing. This market grows year to year. Will translators have work? Will we all be replaced? No. But we might have different roles within the bigger task of multilingual communication.

Brian: Tech is going to be additional tools, not replacements. Tech and humans, that is always the great combination. Do you have any final tips for providing a native experience?

Andrzej: Start with the word respect. Think about how you can respect this person to the fullest so that they feel the most comfortable when they meet you. The world is changing, technology is there, processes are being changed. But the fact that we should respect people, appreciate them, it is valid and will remain valid whatever tools we use. Whether it means trying to use the language of your customers or making your technology easy to use for any type of user, it is all about expressing respect to people that surround you. Just respect people, like them, and think about what that means in any given situation. That will provide the most native experience for the people standing in front of you right now.

Brian: Andrzej, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and everything you shared.

Andrzej: Thank you.

Brian: Andrzej Nedoma, co-founder and former CEO of XTRF Management Systems, now CEO of nedoma.io. Thank you for joining us. Remember, always strive for authenticity and embrace the power of native experiences.