Making Technology Feel Native with Jorge Russo de Santos

Jorge: I don't think the language that the person speaks should be a barrier to accessing information. At Microsoft, something that was really part of the fabric was the concept of globalisation, localisability, and localisation, and making it a native experience in the sense that it felt native to the people that were using the products, but also in the sense of the software, that it was native into the software. You should feel that the software was created for you in mind, and your experience should feel local and relevant.

Brian: Today we are talking with Jorge Russo de Santos, Localisation Programme Manager at Block. He is originally from Portugal. After studying engineering in college, he started working for Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland, where he was the localiser of the first server operating system localised in European Portuguese. The job started his career at Microsoft and in the localisation industry, where he progressed to the role of a software engineer and later project manager working across software and content.

Jorge relocated to Microsoft's Seattle area headquarters in 2003 and continued to work for Microsoft until the mid 2010s. At Microsoft, he worked on Windows servers and tools and cloud and enterprise divisions, which involved different languages, methodologies, and challenges. Jorge has extensive industry experience working at Cisco, Workday, Meta (Facebook), Amazon, and Block (Square), expanding his skill set to hardware, firmware, and multimedia localisation. He is a certified project management professional passionate about localisation. He truly believes that one's native language should not be a barrier to accessing information or technology, and he has made it his life's work.

Brian: Jorge, welcome to The Native Experience. Tell us about yourself and what you do for fun.

Jorge: My name is Jorge. It is actually spelled like Jorge, but I am originally from Portugal. We pronounce the J like in English, so it is pronounced Jorge in Portuguese, similar to the English George. I live in the U.S. around Seattle. I started working in localisation because Microsoft wanted to hire someone that had technical and linguistic skills. I didn't know a lot about that at the time, but I joined because it seemed interesting and I wanted to work in a multinational environment. I haven't looked back since.

In the meantime, I moved continents because I was working in Ireland. I moved to the U.S. and have been working in localisation since. I am now working for a company called Square, which does payments and a bunch of other things to empower small businesses. I also teach classes on localisation project management at the University of Washington, which is really nice.

Brian: You keep a little busy, sounds like.

Jorge: Yes. And that is not taking into account hobbies and family. My hobbies are soccer, although for people outside of the U.S. and Ireland, I should say football. I like cycling and I like to read nonfiction.

Brian: Being a soccer fan, do you like Ted Lasso?

Jorge: I think Ted Lasso is an amazing show for an American audience. I can see how outside of the U.S. it is not as interesting. It is similar to Crazy Rich Asians, which I thought was an image of Asia and Asians from a U.S. perspective. I could see how from someone in Asia, it would not really make a lot of sense. So I love Ted Lasso, but from an American perspective, because that is where I live.

Brian: That is a really interesting perspective. If you had to choose only one language to speak for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Jorge: That is a really tough one. It really depends on what stage in life I would be, because obviously if I didn't speak English, my professional life would go down the drain living in the U.S. But I can not imagine not being able to communicate with my family. So I have to go with the heart on this one and say Portuguese.

Brian: What about if you had to live in one country?

Jorge: Again, I think it is going to depend on which stage of my life I am in. I would always want to be close to my kids. But if I had to make a choice without any preconditions, I would say Costa Rica, just because a country that does not have an army kind of seems like a good place to be and has their priorities straight.

Brian: Are you going to try to get back to Portugal towards the end of your working career?

Jorge: Probably. Once I stop working, I think I will travel more. I don't know if I will live there forever, because it is one of those things: never go back to the place where you were happy. A lot of things have changed and family has moved on, but I will always try to have a connection to Portugal.

Brian: That is the first time I have heard that phrase, "never go back to the place where you were happy." Explain this one.

Jorge: To me, what it speaks to is that when you move forward, you go without baggage and preconceptions. If you move back to the place where you were happy, you always assume that something is going to happen, that you are going to connect with certain people, and that might not be available. So it is always hard to go back to a place where you were happy because your expectations are so high.

There is another expression that a friend of mine uses. When you immigrate, you are never going to be satisfied because whatever place you go to, you are going to miss your culture and your family. If you go back to wherever you came from, you are always going to miss the things that you had where you immigrated to. It is tough when you immigrate.

Brian: The advice on this would be to love what you have right now and continue to move forward.

Jorge: That is one of the things that I regret about social media because I think growing up without social media, I had the opportunity to rebrand myself, grow in different directions. As an example, my full first name is Jorge Miguel and everybody used to call me Miguel back in Portugal. When I moved to an English-speaking country, I started going by Jorge. It didn't work out so well because my manager was married to a Mexican lady and everybody was calling me Jorge with a Spanish pronunciation. Then they hired another person whose name was Jorge, spelled the same way but pronounced in a different way. It was very confusing.

I think the fact that you can move forward and evolve in different ways is something that social media can prevent because it can keep you stuck to an identity that you had for a period of time, which might not be the best fit going forward.

Brian: I know you are a big proponent for continuous education. One of the values at LEXIGO is to evolve, which is about continuous improvement, not only professionally, but also personally. What do you love about continuous education?

Jorge: Having different perspectives on a common problem is always good. It also makes life more interesting because if you are just working on the same things over and over, you can start to be a little cynical about your work or life. In your career, you can think of it as a ladder where you can have steps that are deeper, learning something, feeling comfortable with it, establishing yourself at that pace, and then learning more and growing more. I think it is a really good philosophy for your personal and professional life.

I think it is very important for people to have different areas of growth. Maybe you are in a position where there is not a lot of room for growth, but you can grow in other areas. You can start cooking, gardening, volunteering, public speaking. There are a lot of areas where we can enrich our life outside the professional realm. And I think if you do those things, good professional opportunities will materialise in the future.

Brian: Being curious is a huge thing too. How often do we listen when someone is talking? How often do we ask clarifying questions? Or do we just jump to our own decision and our own viewpoint before really understanding the other person's side?

Jorge: In my family life, as a parent and as a partner, something that I needed to really work on is to just hear. Don't jump to a solution, just hear what people have to say. I am trying to get better at that.

Brian: What word or phrase have you encountered that didn't directly translate into another language?

Jorge: Portuguese people and anyone that speaks Portuguese know the word I am going to choose. I think if you are a good translator and have a really good cultural understanding of both languages, there might not be exactly a word, but there should be a way to translate the expression. The word is saudade. It is a Portuguese expression that means a feeling of longing for something that has gone or that might disappear. It can be a place, a person, a feeling. It is a word that is very hard to translate.

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

Jorge: Growing up in Portugal, there is not a lot of native cultural production in terms of films. I watched a lot of foreign movies and read a lot of books in English. But my favourite is Life is Beautiful from Roberto Benigni. It tells the story of a father that goes to a concentration camp and he hides the situation from his son. I have watched it more than a couple of times. The first time, I didn't have kids, but I still loved the movie. Watching it with kids, it is something else. Really touching. It is funny, emotional, and gives you a historic perspective.

Brian: Are you nerding out on anything specific right now?

Jorge: I should be nerding out on LLMs and ChatGPT and all of that. I have been not going into it too much because I want the dust to settle before I make more of a jump. I have been lucky enough to see a couple of waves happen, first with the internet and then Web 2.0. Sometimes you jump straight into the beginning and ride that wave, but I think for this one, I want to see how things develop.

There is a really good case for using LLMs to do away with the most boring aspects of some roles and doing automation. But I think if we are not careful, we are going to be producing a lot of content that most people will not be able to use, and then using AI on the other end to distil all of that text. Some of the things happening around AI with voice, video, and image are mind-blowing. I will eventually nerd out on it, but for the moment, I am trying to keep a distance and think about how it is going to develop.

Brian: How have you seen localisation change over the years?

Jorge: When I started out in localisation last century, I thought this was an engineering problem. We were going to solve a couple of these issues and then it would just be a translation problem. You could see where the recycling of previous translated work was going, and you could foresee that AI would play a role in translation.

The part that I didn't foresee is that a lot of these problems I thought would be fixed keep reappearing. That is the part about having the right context, getting the right information. Even in the same language, you can have someone with exactly the same cultural background as you and still have issues around communication. You can have the same language skills, the same accent, grow up in the same house, and from time to time you are going to say, "I didn't understand that."

If you have that happening in the same language, once you start expanding to a broader region, to continents and across languages, there is always going to be a case where you need clarification. We would not have humour if we didn't have those misunderstandings.

Another thing I observed is that people feel their job is disappearing. Unfortunately, I think that is the case for some roles. But overall, it will lead to better opportunities. With localisation, I thought my job as a localiser was going to be taken over because automation would handle more and more. But what happened was an explosion of content. Formats that we didn't think about localising 10 or 15 years ago, like podcasts, blogs, and video, are now available. I am optimistic for the future, but things need to evolve. There are still a lot of interesting challenges in localisation. We are just going to have to work in different ways.

Brian: I agree. Every technology wave promises to take the human out of the equation, but that hasn't happened. If anything, it gives us more work. Humans are essential for context, for listening, for understanding. It is a tool, not a replacement.

Jorge: I think about this a lot. When I was born, I was the last grandchild for my grandparents. I used to spend the summers with them and they still lived in a very traditional way. I was maybe eight years old when they got running water into their house. What I do every day, sitting at a desk, I don't know if my grandparents would recognise this as work. Sometimes I think about what it is going to be for the next generation. Are they just entertaining thoughts and not doing anything physically?

Brian: Looking back at your career at Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and now Block, how have you provided truly native experiences?

Jorge: I have a personal motto: I don't think the language that the person speaks should be a barrier to accessing information. At Microsoft, something that was really part of the fabric was the concept of globalisation, localisability, and localisation, and making it a native experience in the sense that it felt native to the people using the products, but also in the sense of the software, that it was native into the software.

You should feel that the software was created for you in mind, and your experience should feel local and relevant. You open Windows, you don't think this is an American product. You think this is something I can use to do my work, find my files, print. It feels native to you.

There was a period where I went outside of localisation and worked as a release manager. But I quickly came back because I get a lot of personal satisfaction from making sure people can access information in their native language.

Brian: What advice would you have for us as we try to provide a truly native experience?

Jorge: Empathy. Put yourself in someone else's shoes and understand their experience. Try to make it delightful for them. That is true for localisation, but also a bunch of other things. And make sure you are receptive to feedback. Sometimes you can have the best of intentions, but when you localise something, people are upset because the options are different, the character names are different, or it doesn't have the same feel.

Don't just assume that a user or a person wants something. Check in to see if that is really what they want. If you are a company or an individual trying to break into localisation, find a need and be very good at it. I get a lot of people contacting me on LinkedIn saying they are experts on everything with high quality and low prices. It comes across as not being authentic. It is a much more realistic avenue to say, I am specialised in this and I can provide really good quality because I am focused on this. Once you establish yourself in that area, you can expand. But saying you can do everything with high quality and low prices is probably not real.

Brian: That is very good advice. Thank you so much, Jorge. I really appreciate your time.

Jorge: Thank you, Brian. It was really nice talking to you. I learned a lot from you. For instance, I didn't know that really tall people always had back problems, so I have more empathy for tall people now.

Brian: Jorge Russo de Santos, Localisation Programme Manager at Block. Thank you so much for joining us. Remember, always strive for authenticity and embrace the power of native experiences.

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