Localisation, Technology and the Gartner Hype Cycle with Josef Kubovsky

Josef: I think everyone heard of ChatGPT. Everyone who is not from our industry thinks, oh, I need to translate content, I will just throw it into ChatGPT and it is going to do the job for me. It will. The question is, is it going to tell the truth?

Brian: Today we are talking with Josef Kubovsky, CEO of Nimdzi Insights. In 19 years in the language industry, Josef has developed outstanding business acumen. After receiving a degree in international relations, he worked his way up from sales manager at a regional translation company to branch manager, then moved to an international MLV and eventually became head of sales at a technology company where he managed a worldwide sales team of 27. Today Josef uses his unique blend of language, tech, and sales skills to help Nimdzi Insights partners pursue business excellence and growth. Josef, welcome to The Native Experience.

Josef: Hi, Brian. Very good to meet you. Thanks for the opportunity.

Brian: Tell us about yourself and what you are nerding out on right now.

Josef: My friends know me because I can never sit in one place. I start talking to everyone and asking silly questions or challenging them. I just returned from a hiking trip at almost 3,000 metres with friends from primary school, secondary school, and university. We escaped from our families, six of us, and enjoyed the fresh air. My typical life is being at home with the family, locked in my computer, having fun with people like you at 7pm my time, because that is when most of my clients wake up. Or those I have in Japan, they start or finish their day at 7am my time.

Josef: I am a father of two. Recently their teacher asked them to go and see what their parents do. They said, we don't know, our dad just stares at a computer and talks to the screen all the time. I am bringing my daughter to an event tomorrow. We are going to see the Baltics together so she can see how I speak at three conferences in two days.

Josef: I have an amazing team and an amazing opportunity with a research and consulting company where our mission is to create the knowledge to support people and make them successful. You get very good feedback on the type of work you do, which is always appreciated.

Brian: Any specific examples of how you have helped recently?

Josef: Today I had a call with a small translation company. Two years ago when we went for a consulting project, they were thinking about how to find more clients and sell internationally because they had exhausted the local market. Today, after two years, they told me they had totally shifted their mind and now see a huge amount of opportunity on their local market. They restructured their expansion and are much more positive about new business opportunities.

Josef: We also work with companies who buy translation and localisation services. Typically their top management says, oh, we forgot, we also need to translate our product, our software, our content, and we only have two days. These localisation teams are seen as the end of the food chain. But if you think about it, they are responsible for making sure the organisation will be successful when entering a new market. If they make a major mistake, it can impact 90% of the revenue. For a company in my region in Central Europe, localisation can play a critical role for the future of the organisation.

Josef: We help them convince their bosses to understand the value. We work with top branding companies. You would be amazed how often there are critical errors in marketing campaigns. Like sending marketing to Arabic countries with ladies in bikinis. What do you think is going to happen? There are also very small things. I am going to speak about accessibility at the conferences. The European Accessibility Act has six years of implementation starting from 2017, so we are very close to everyone having to follow this to sell on the European market. The localisation teams can help with this. We do a lot of change management at Nimdzi.

Brian: Do you have other examples of mistakes companies make?

Josef: The typical joke within our industry is brand names. You have a car brand that went to a country and the name means something like a swear word. Who is going to buy a car with that name? Companies learned this during the process and now they shift names depending on where they are exporting.

Josef: We are getting better at presenting the importance of localisation, especially with e-commerce and international business being much faster than 20 years ago. You can put something online and people can access it from any market the next day. But which markets are going to give you the revenue you are looking for?

Josef: One gaming company has huge potential in the Asian market. But they invest ten times more to localise into Norwegian than Indonesian, even though they had over 100,000 downloads in the first days in Indonesia compared to 300 downloads in Norway. Why? Because people in Norway are used to and can afford to pay for the premium version. This is what localisation departments need to investigate.

Josef: We did one exciting project on India for a toy company. You have two buyer profiles: the kid who needs to like and understand the toy, and the adult who is the investor. Your marketing campaign has to target both. And the Indian market has so many languages, so you need to determine which ones are worth investing in.

Brian: Tell us about technology in language services.

Josef: My background is language technology. I worked in a language technology company for 10 years. Everyone who is not from our industry thinks they can just throw content into ChatGPT and it will do the job. It will create some translation. It will probably be correct on what it is translating. But is the message really in there? Is it not creating a hallucination?

Josef: This is an industry that has been using technology for over 80 or 90 years. The first technology for machine translation was there in the fifties or even earlier. Then there were tools that would predict or suggest translations. Today we have ChatGPT that creates great content, but who knows if the message is in there.

Josef: There are over 1,000 technologies related to language services: translation tools, machine translation tools, tools to manage the translation process, audiovisual tools for subtitling and dubbing, quality management, terminology management, speech recognition, text-to-speech, and artificial voice creation. The question is how do we make sure people are correctly rewarded, because you still need a final check. Is it not a hallucination? Is the terminology right? Are we speaking to the right audience?

Brian: These are tools to assist us, not replacements. They still need to be checked.

Josef: You have this Gartner Hype Cycle. You start with the innovation trigger. Someone had the idea, people were excited. Then more users come and you get to the peak of inflated expectations. Suddenly you realise it is not as great as expected, there are hallucinations with large language models. Then it goes down through the trough of disillusionment where people realise they still have to check it.

Josef: But then we have the slope of enlightenment where we start using these tools every day for creating content, summarising, searching for data. You have to understand what you are searching for and make sure you are not being confused, but it does help. Eventually it reaches the plateau of productivity where it becomes an everyday tool. And then there will be a new innovation trigger.

Brian: Being an early adopter is fun, but early adopters understand it will not be perfect in the beginning.

Brian: What drives your passion? Why does Nimdzi do what you do?

Josef: Many of us come from the language service industry. We love challenges. We enjoy moments where there is no obvious way to go. We love to identify new opportunities. Our mission is we create the knowledge. It is the thing the particular client needs to succeed. We have a couple of hundred years of experience if you put all of us together.

Josef: We see those challenges that people are repeating. We want to help them figure out what has already been experienced so they can move on and succeed. This year has been extremely stressful because of large language models. Many of us knew this was not going to change our lives by being punished by artificial intelligence. But how do we implement it? How do we benefit from it? How do we use these tools on a daily basis?

Josef: SAP created an internal challenge: come up with solutions that large language models could generate and present them. There were over 500 ideas, but only 10 were implemented. The conditions were saving, measured against how much cost reduction; and time, how much effort would be saved as an organisation. Only those that made a major impact on those two factors were selected.

Brian: You said off mic that localisation is the cheapest way to test a new market. Tell us about that.

Josef: The reason is simple. We translate the content. We do not need to hire anyone in the local market. We don't need salespeople. We don't need a local marketing agency. We can localise into that particular region and see what the return will be. Will the reactions be positive or negative? How will the market react? Without needing to invest in building an office in that region. It is the cheapest way to test.

Brian: Any actionable steps you would want us to walk away with?

Josef: For those on the vendor side, we really need to focus on the customer. Be hyper customer-centric. Present the latest trends. That also goes for those doing language services internally in corporations. Go the extra mile because you are the ones who have the data and the connections globally that will help the organisation expand in the right direction.

Josef: I am having so many conversations where people feel frustrated because they cannot convince their bosses. Don't be afraid to step up and speak to your managers. The thing you need to change is that you need to speak their language. Show them the data, show them the opportunity. Don't speak about the number of languages or the costs. Talk about the opportunity. Show them potential users. You have that data internally. Go to your marketing teams, or come to us.

Josef: If I am a localisation manager internally, do all the departments really come to me? Am I the go-to person when we are talking about content creation or video creation that will ever want to become international? If not, it is your fault. You need to create relationships in all departments, whether documentation, marketing, or engineering. You will be the last person before the product goes out. If you have those relationships, it is much easier for them to understand why you need extra time or why you need to know things in advance.

Brian: Josef, thank you. This was fascinating. We have definitely learned a lot.

Josef: Thank you, Brian. We covered many topics. I feel like we really touched the surface. I was jumping from one topic to another but I hope this was beneficial for the audience.

Brian: Josef Kubovsky, CEO of Nimdzi Insights. Thank you for joining us. Remember, always strive for authenticity and embrace the power of native experiences.