Uber's Localisation Strategy and End-User Perception with Renato Beninatto

Renato: I have that constant itch to go somewhere else, to visit a different country and to learn a new culture and learn a few words, how they curse, how they greet, how they eat.

Brian: There are two words that you need to learn in every language: hello or good morning, and thank you. Those are the two phrases that are essential for conversation. People appreciate that you make an effort to say it in their language. Sometimes if you are able to say a couple of sentences, you get into that situation where the person thinks you are a speaker and they start talking to you in a language you don't understand.

Renato: I have to say, stop, stop, stop. I just know how to say thank you very much and pass me the steak.

Brian: Today we are talking with Renato Beninatto. He is the chairman and co-founder of Nimdzi Insights. With decades of experience in international consulting, market research, sales and marketing, Renato provides the strategic direction that helps Nimdzi better serve clients worldwide. In addition to his work at Nimdzi, Renato is also the co-author of The General Theory of the Translation Company, a co-owner of Multilingual Media, an adjunct professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and a frequent industry speaker. Renato, welcome to The Native Experience.

Renato: Thank you, Brian. An honour to be here. I had about 100 episodes of a podcast called Globally Speaking where we were talking about localisation, but that was in a past life in a different company. The podcast lives on, but I am not in it anymore.

Brian: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Renato: My name is Renato Beninatto. I was born in Brazil, but I have lived in seven countries. I have three passports and three nationalities. I am the chairman of a company called Nimdzi Insights. It is a market research and consulting company in the language services area. We publish research, rankings, technology analysis, and we work with large enterprises and translation companies all over the world. We have about 40 people in 23 countries, and we speak something like 28 languages among all the employees in the organisation.

Renato: I have been in the language industry before it was called the language industry. I started in 1983 with a small translation company in Brazil and eventually had a career working with the largest companies in the world as an executive. I started two market research companies in this space because it wasn't an industry and there was not enough data. So I went to gather the information. I am the guy who knows a little bit about everything, enough to be dangerous on any topic related to the language services industry.

Brian: They talk about the jack of all trades, master of none.

Renato: The interesting thing is that the full expression is jack of all trades, master of none, which is better than only one. Language services, translation, subtitling, all of it is communication. Communication permeates every single human activity. One day you might be translating a legal document that involves two chemical companies and talks about chemical compounds. The next day you might be translating a romantic comedy for TV. The following day you are translating an intermittent fasting software application. You need to be a little bit of an expert in everything.

Renato: There is a difference between being curious in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, and now. What curiosity means evolves based on access to information. It is a requirement that you be curious in this space because the main skill is to learn how to find information, how to find words, how to paraphrase. But there is a different element between the translator, the individual, and the translation company. I wrote a book called The General Theory of the Translation Company that talks about the business of translation, which is different from the activity of translation.

Renato: Language is a fascinating world, but the business of translation deals with complexity, with helping customers communicate and sell more. I have worked in projects with clients that require translation into 132 languages, including Inuktitut and Navajo and Apache. When you get into situations like that, an individual might do the romantic part of translating words. But there is an element of complexity where you need the intervention of a project manager or coordinator to organise it all. The role of the language services industry is not only to translate but to enable content to be deployed in multiple languages, multiple geographies, multiple formats, multiple platforms. It is chaos. Managing chaos is the speciality of an organisation.

Brian: Do you have a specific example of trying to break into a certain language or culture?

Renato: I mentioned Inuktitut because I became a specialist in it. Inuktitut is spoken in the Arctic Circle by the Inuit. Even though it is a language with a small population, under a million speakers, it covers three major geographic landscapes. You have the North American Inuktitut spoken in Alaska and Canada, written with Latin characters. You have the Russian Inuktitut on the other side of the Arctic, written in Cyrillic. And then you have Greenlandish Inuktitut where they write with their own alphabet. It is basically the same language with different variations across a vast space.

Renato: The second language of the Inuktitut speakers in Canada might be French or English. In Greenland, it is Danish. In Russia, it is Russian. Our company was asked by Microsoft to translate Windows 7 into Inuktitut. We had a group of students at the University of Montreal that helped with the localisation. But the following year, it was hunting season. They were all back home. We could not find enough translators. We suggested to the client that they had to drop it, which is the first time in my life that I told a client not to do translation.

Renato: There was a futurist, John Naisbitt, who wrote a book called The Global Paradox. One of the characteristics of the global paradox is that the more powerful and richer communities get, the more they revert to their native languages.

Renato: I have this concept that I like to call the underwear effect. If you are a speaker of a foreign language, the closer you are to being in your privacy, the more likely you are to prefer your mother tongue. You curse when you stomp your toe into a chair in your native language. You seldom curse in a foreign language. When you are in a business environment, wearing a suit, you are more likely to accept a foreign language.

Brian: That is very complex. Every culture is different. A 15-year-old talks differently than a 40-year-old because of generational differences. Then you are trying to translate all of those colloquialisms.

Renato: Literary classics are retranslated over and over again. The language changes with time. The main story and relationships stay the same, but the words and attitudes change. There was a new translation of the Odyssey made for the first time by a woman translator that gave a completely different perspective to the story.

Brian: Which languages do you speak?

Renato: My native language is Portuguese. The first foreign language I learned was Spanish, which is relatively easy for Portuguese speakers. I actually learned to read and write in Spanish before Portuguese because I lived in Paraguay as a child. I speak Italian, French, and English. The reason I speak these languages is not because I went to school to learn them. My father worked in an international company. I lived in all these countries growing up, went to school, needed friends and a girlfriend, and needed to learn the local language.

Brian: If you had to choose one language only, which one?

Renato: Portuguese. It is my native language. It happens to be a very beautiful language, a very poetic language. I speak the Brazilian version, which is much more melodic than European Portuguese. I enjoy our music, our literature, everything that comes in the Portuguese language.

Brian: You lived in seven countries. Which ones?

Renato: Argentina, Paraguay, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, the United States, and Czech Republic. I did not learn Czech because I worked there for two years but travelled a lot. The official language of the company was English.

Brian: If you could live in only one country, what would it be?

Renato: I have made that choice. I collect countries. I have visited 91 so far. I make it a goal to visit three new countries every year. The country I would go back to, and I am planning to go back to, is Portugal. My plan is to retire in Lisbon. It is a country that is in Europe, culturally the same as Brazil. I have all the benefits of language, culture, and food, and I am in the middle of everything. Five hours from the East Coast of the United States, an hour and a half to three hours from anywhere in Europe, and nine hours from Brazil.

Brian: Of the countries you have visited, take Portugal out, what was your favourite?

Renato: The next one is the one I haven't visited yet. But probably Italy. As you can see by my name, I am of Italian descent. I lived in Italy when I was a teenager. It is a country with so much beauty, diversity, culture, and history. My family is originally from Venice, probably the most stunning city I have ever visited. I go there multiple times and I never get tired of going back.

Brian: You are of Italian descent but grew up in Brazil?

Renato: I am third generation Italian. Brazil has the biggest Italian population outside of Italy, about 35 million Italian Brazilians. My great grandfather went to Brazil in 1873. I was able to get Italian citizenship because Italian citizenship is acquired by bloodline, not by birth. We also have the biggest Japanese population outside of Japan. We have a huge German population. We have more Lebanese people in Brazil than there are citizens in Lebanon. It is 220 million inhabitants with a lot of variety. Every Brazilian is a mixture of multiple cultures.

Renato: Brazil had enslaved populations and a slave trade for 400 years. It has the third largest Black population in the world after Nigeria and Ethiopia. We received something like 5 million enslaved Africans against something like 750,000 in the United States. Everybody in Brazil is mixed. I did my 23andMe, and I have Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, 10.5% African from Ghana and Angola. This is a typical Brazilian.

Brian: You mentioned you are a third culture kid.

Renato: The third culture kid is a person that is a little bit displaced. Either your parents are from a different nationality than the country where you live, or you are from another country speaking a different language than the language you speak at home. As I grew up and went to school in five different countries speaking four different languages, I was always from elsewhere. Even when I am in Brazil, people ask me where I am from. That is the hardest question you can ask a third culture kid. One answer is where I was born. Another is where I live. Another was where I work. You are always from somewhere else, but you are always home. You are comfortable wherever you are because you are a chameleon.

Renato: When I was around 14, I realised I had never lived more than three years in any country. That was the lifestyle I was used to. I thought, what job could give me this ability to move every three years? I thought of becoming a diplomat. I studied and prepared. Then when the time came, I was 19 and went to work for Arthur Anderson, which is Accenture today, and I was making more money than my friends in the diplomatic career. That forced me to live for 18 years in Rio de Janeiro, but always with this desire to travel.

Renato: I have that constant itch to go somewhere else, to visit a different country and learn a new culture, learn a few words, how they curse, how they greet, how they eat.

Brian: How they curse, how they greet, how they eat. I love it.

Renato: There are two words you need to learn in every language: hello or good morning, and thank you. People appreciate that you make an effort to say it in their language. Sometimes if you say a couple of sentences, the person thinks you are a speaker and they start talking to you. I have to say, stop, I just know how to say thank you and pass me the steak.

Brian: I am always fascinated by how different cultures eat.

Renato: One of the things I learned from a salesperson is that salespeople and politicians need to be able to eat everything because you don't know where you are going to be. You cannot have allergies. You cannot be a vegetarian. You have to be able to engage because that is how you socialise, through food. Preparing a meal is a language of love. When you are invited by someone at their home, I really enjoy trying their food and eating the same way they eat.

Renato: Last year, my third country was Ghana in Africa. First time in West Africa. I was working as a consultant for a client. They wanted to bring me to a fancy restaurant. I said, take me where you go to eat. It was the most amazing experience because it was food I eat in Brazil. The ingredients and flavours are similar. We use a lot of manioc or cassava. It is basic in Brazilian food and basic in their food.

Renato: I enjoy eating with your hands and trying new things. The strangest dish I had was a bullfrog soup in China. A frog in the hot pot, you take the pieces and suck it and it is delicious. Eating snake, eating pigeons in Egypt. What I like to do is walk around, go where people eat, and eat what people are eating.

Renato: I was once in a restaurant with a Chinese friend in Shanghai. All the workers were eating there. You sat down at a long table and all the chopsticks were in a glass of water. You just grabbed the chopsticks and ate. We had the most amazing noodles and buns with soup inside. Apparently I was the first foreigner to go to this small restaurant.

Brian: I love going where the locals eat too. When I ask what would you eat, what would you fix yourself, that is when the magic happens.

Renato: The other trick I use: last time in Venice, every restaurant seemed like a tourist trap. One afternoon I was at a cafe, started chatting with the owner, and asked her where do the locals go to eat? She gave me a list of five or six restaurants. We went to three of them and they were unforgettable, fantastic restaurants. Ask the locals where they go. They don't go to Pizza Hut.

Brian: Tell us about your experience with Uber.

Renato: Uber is one of our consulting clients. We were doing an audit of their processes. The challenge was that they were having perceived issues with the quality of their translation. We went in and reviewed their process and they had three levels of quality control. They had the in-country person giving an opinion, a partner company that did the translation, another company that did quality control, and an in-house language lead reviewing everything.

Renato: In theory, you had this perfect environment where quality would be 100% great, but they were having issues because the reviewers could not agree on terminology. There were a lot of complaints from translators about corrections back and forth. And most importantly, it was taking too long. The quality control process affected their delivery time. There is a saying in translation: it is better to be good on time than perfect too late.

Renato: One of the questions we asked was, have you asked your clients what they think about the translation? They said no. I thought of my mother who is over 80 and uses Uber and doesn't speak English. She never knew the app was translated. We said, we bet that a huge percentage of your clients have no idea that the app is translated. So why are you worrying so much about the quality of the translation? You need to worry about the quality of the language that the end user is seeing.

Renato: We created a usability test. We did this for 40 countries and we do it regularly now. We asked, among several questions, a simple one: if Uber were a person, where would they come from? Two-thirds of the clients in every country thought Uber came from their country, from another city, from another state, from a different neighbourhood, from the same city they lived in. They thought it was a local app.

Renato: We ended up helping Uber save $4 million a year in quality control costs by going to the market, evaluating how people perceived the language, and looking at little tweaks they needed around tone, formality versus informality, and forms of address. A few languages required additional attention, like French and Japanese, but most languages were good enough with just one pass of quality control.

Renato: The important thing about translation and language is that we are not doing it for ourselves. We are doing it for an end user, for a person that needs to accomplish a task with that information. Can the person with a typo order a car to come and pick them up in 10 minutes? Yes, even if there is a typo. Can we correct the typo? We can. There is an element of functionality that plays a role. But these are not universal solutions. This doesn't work for a medical device or an investment prospectus or court proceedings.

Brian: If you were to boil this down to two or three pieces of advice for providing a truly native experience, what would you say?

Renato: Talk to your clients. That is number one. Understand why they are using your product and what the importance of the content is. There is a difference between the user interface and the support content. You might have different processes for different types of content.

Renato: Understand the difference between pre-sales content and after-sales content. Pre-sales content is usually much more important because the organisation is in business to sell and grow. Marketing material, websites, packaging, things that directly influence the purchase decision need a lot more attention and budget than support files. People don't read manuals anymore. They go to YouTube. Invest in translating your YouTube content more than your support material.

Renato: The third point is do more languages. Companies that embark on localisation never drop languages. Over 40 years, I can count on one hand the companies that have dropped languages. Language is a growth multiplier. The cost of translating content is significantly lower than creating original content. A good translation will help you expand and retain clients in many more markets.

Brian: Renato, this was a fun conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Renato: Anytime, Brian. Thank you.

Brian: Renato Beninatto, chairman and co-founder at Nimdzi Insights. Thank you so much. Remember, always strive for authenticity and embrace the power of native experiences.

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