Ben | The Global Connect

Community Connect – 2011 review

At Language Connect, we are committed to being a socially responsible business by engaging with our local community, promoting sustainability and operating in a fair and transparent manner. Our programme to showcase our ethical business values, Community Connect, has had its most active year.

Here’s a recap on Community Connect’s activities this year:

In March we held a translation and interpreting workshop at the Convent of Jesus and Mary Language College to raise awareness of language learning and give students a hands-on experience of using their second language to pursue a career in the language services industry (our work with the college was highly commended for innovation at the Business Language Champion Awards)
As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, two of our Project Management staff sat on a panel at the Convent of Jesus and Mary Language College to talk to the students about using languages in business. I went back to my old university, Bristol, to sit on a panel of alumni in business to speak about my experience of setting up and growing a business
Our Operations Manager in Germany took part in a student mentoring scheme in Munich
For our London office design project we promoted two local artists who created a unique and inspiring design. Additionally, we donated the paint and the tools left over from the project to a local charity that promotes and teaches art in the area
Through Kiva, we provided $1,000 in micro-loans to small businesses/entrepreneurial initiatives in developing countries
We donated our old PCs to a charity, Computer Aid International, that sends them to the developing world
We are making donations of over £600 to local charities in the UK, Germany and Australia in-lieu of e-cards that we sent out this week.

Special thanks go to all our staff that have participated in Community Connect this year.

An ancient modern city – Notes from Istanbul

Turkey’s long been a country of interest for me. I studied the Ottomans at school and as a child it was the destination of our most exotic family holiday from which I recall blistering heat and the locals’ obsession with football. In recent years, however, Turkey has been more in my thoughts due to the increase of demand for its language at Language Connect. It has gone from historically near the bottom of our top 15 list to the 6th most requested language by our clients this year. Keen to find out more about what could be driving this, last week I went on a UK Trade & Investment-backed trade mission to Istanbul with several other UK SMEs.

The first thing that’s striking about Turkey is the size of its population and in particular the number of young people in the country. It’s second only to Germany in Europe with 74m people, of which half are below the age of 29 making it Europe’s biggest youth population. As has been the trend in emerging economies, there has been mass migration into the cities and metropolitan areas. Istanbul is now Europe’s largest city with 13 million residents. The sprawl of the city continues as far the eye can see, interrupted only by the Bosphorus which marks out the boundary between Europe and Asia.

The next thing you notice in Istanbul is the construction sites. Turkey’s construction industry is one of the jewels in its economy’s crown. You can find over 20 shopping malls in the central provinces of Istanbul and row after row of residential tower blocks in the suburbs. There is speculation of a property bubble; however, Turkey escaped the 2008 financial crisis without the collapse or bail-out of a single Turkish bank. In fact, it was one of the few counties whose credit rating was upgraded in recent years.

The Turks are not just builders. Turkey’s snug position as the gateway between Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia give it a competitive edge for international trade. Turkey is home to some of the biggest multinational companies you’ve probably never heard of since very few of its family-run holding companies are public-listed. Beko, a household appliance manufacturer, command a 14% share of the UK’s refrigerator market. Did you know they were Turkish? Neither did I. Vestel, a Turkish TV manufacturer, are Europe’s largest accounting for 16% of the LCD market and 25% of digital set-top boxes. ‘Made in Turkey’ is now printed on a staggering 1 out of every 6 electrical household appliances in Europe. Turkey’s geographic edge is further enhanced by the Turks’ fundamental understanding of European taste, sometimes lacking in products from manufacturers further East.

Communication is in Turks’ blood. They love to gossip and have a massive appetite for the latest technology. I saw more iPads in the cafes of Istanbul than I do in London, and most of these were the newer iPad 2 model. More than a million smartphones are sold in the country every year, and almost everyone, including drivers worryingly, are glued to them.

Istanbul is building from the country’s strong base of textiles production to becoming a fashion hub in its own right. Istanbul Fashion Week took place last week attracting 25,000 people who booked up most of the city’s hotel rooms. The familiar UK fashion retailers are all represented in force around Istanbul’s glittering shopping malls. However, domestic retailers and brands such as Koton and Ramsey are equally abundant. At an official event, the CEO of Ramsey told us his story of starting and running his business of 100 staff in London for 15 years. Acknowledging the lower cost base, he moved the business to his home country in the mid-80s. His company is now a major clothing retailer, exporter and household name in Turkey employing 2,500 people.

Whilst the Turkish people love shopping in the hubbub of the city’s bazaars, shopping malls and avenues, online commerce in Turkey is also coming of age. An estimated 15 billion TL (c. $8bn) of revenues were generated online last year and this market is expected to grow 50% this year. Internet penetration has risen to 50% and, in a recent survey, nearly all of Turkey’s Internet users said that they were likely to buy online within the next 6 months. Their love of communication is also heavily reflected in online consumer habits. Social media use is very high, and I saw a number of retailers promoting their Facebook fan pages and Twitter profiles in-store.

A Turkish business that has had remarkable success from embracing the Turk’s love of fashion and communication is Trendyol (meaning ‘become a trendy person’ in Turkish). Launched in early 2010, the web-based business offers its users ‘flash sales’: customers sign up to get access to sales where the latest fashions are available at heavily discounted prices. Facebook fans regularly get asked by the company which brands and styles they are interested in gathering customer feedback for future sales. The site’s popularity has exploded over just 18 months to where it now counts 4 million users and has $100m in revenue. This success has not come unnoticed; a US venture capital firm with investments in LinkedIn and Zynga have recently invested $26m into Trendyol.

As power, money and influence shift East, Istanbul and Turkey’s strategic location looks likely to sustain the cultural, economic and political progression it’s currently enjoying. It’s fascinating that, along with cities like Beijing and Delhi, the resurgence of an ancient global city happens in the 21st Century, a new world of technology revolution and globalisation. Maybe it’s true to say that the world doesn’t change much after all.

Best Business for International Trade nomination

Language Connect shortlisted for International Trade Award

We’re delighted to have received another recognition today from the South London Business Awards. They have shortlisted Language Connect in the Best Business for International Trade category. This good news comes just a few weeks since we were Highly Commended for Innovation at the Business Language Champions Awards.

In less than 18 months we have set-up, launched and grown our first two international offices organically. Today our overseas businesses employ a total of 6 full-time staff and generate 25% of our revenue.

Our international expansion has benefitted our clients served by our head office in London. We can now offer 24-hour customer service support and have been able to improve our productivity by co-ordinating with linguists in different time zones to dramatically improve the time to market of urgent projects.

Furthermore, as we work with a lot of clients who are embarking on international expansion in their own organisations, our first-hand experience of going international has helped us offer more value-added assistance to them. For instance, we were able to advise one online retailer expanding into Germany in great depth about local payment and processing methods.

Outside of our office locations we work with clients based outside of the UK in over 25 countries including the US, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, UAE, India, China, Japan and New Zealand.

Our customer service is provided round the clock by a global sales team based in our offices in the UK, Germany and Australia and we have plans to expand to the US by the end of 2011.

GALA 2011 conference – Notes from Lisbon

We joined over 250 delegates from all over the world at the annual Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) conference in Lisbon to listen and discuss the latest ideas, trends and news within our industry. The title for this year’s conference was: The Language of Business. The Business of Language.

GALA’s organization of the event was highly polished (amazingly so considering the GALA folk are mostly US-based); they kept all of the attendees’ schedules packed with a mixture of keynote speeches, roundtable and panel discussions as well as networking opportunities. We particularly loved the intensive “speed networking” event where we got to pitch to 90 different people in as many minutes!

Here were some of the key themes from the GALA conference:

The language services industry is in a phase of structural change. Disruption to traditional processes and business models is coming from new technology and new ideas on workflow management. New technology is automating the manual workflow steps involved in integrating translation with content production and content management in the publication supply chain. It is also empowering greater numbers of people to work collaboratively by using functionality-rich text authoring and editing tools hosted ‘in the cloud’.

A frequently recurring term at the conference was Machine Translation (MT) with proponents and critics voicing their opinions in equal measure. Some large buyers of translations showcased their successful deployments of MT and pointed to significant productivity and quality gains. Dell had recently run a controlled experiment on a group of product pages, one version of the pages had been machine translated and human edited. The other version had been human translated. Both were run consecutively over several weeks on the Dell site. After analyzing the web statistics, they found no material difference in the primary web metrics such as click-through or conversion rates.

Language providers had a more sceptical tone about MT than the buyers on the whole, in particular, highlighting the difficulty of finding translators prepared to work with text after it’s been through an MT engine. Convincing translators of the economics of MT (getting them to accept lower rates of pay per word) was also cited understandably as being an uphill struggle.

Jochen Hummel, one of the founders of TRADOS, remarked in his keynote that he believes the technology (open source, cloud-based, collaborative tools) is ripe for business model disruption across the whole industry just like the concept of word repetition discounts did for TRADOS and TM.

GALA 2011 Machine Translation Panel

The strong focus on technology confirmed our commitment to reducing our clients’ translation costs over the long-term by being early adopters of disruptive technology and processes. The technology discussion led on to GALA announcing that it is working with a leading figure in technology standards to spear-head a new standards initiative (following the closure of LISA). The necessity for a set of industry standards is more apparent than ever as the lack of compatibility is costing the industry millions of dollars every year. There is a clear dichotomy though between the desirable aim of interoperable, open-source technology systems, which translators can use at zero cost, and the proprietary technology providers’ ‘walled gardens’ which generate significant software licensing revenues for those firms.

Collaboration between language service providers was another key theme of the conference. There was an intriguing session with Google and Dell about how their language service providers have had to work together (driven from the client-side) to share language assets, knowledge and collaborate on processes (Google even employ 1 agency as a reviewer and supply chain co-ordinator for their other suppliers).

Rare language skills and unusual pairs were under the microscope. Chinese from and into Portuguese, for example, is a rare language pair that has seen an increase in popularity recently due to growing Chinese exports to Brazil. There is often a limited supply of linguists with the relevant rare language skills. If there were more transparency of linguist rates and availability in rare languages, then access to rare in-demand skills would improve while costs and delays would remain low.

In summary, the GALA 2011 conference gave attendees a fair representation of the current stage of progress within the language services industry and brought key stakeholders together from the buy-side, sell-side and technology providers. If future GALA conferences can match up to the standard set in Lisbon then they will be not-to-miss events for industry professionals.

China adds to its shopping trolley

Language Connect recently provided interpreters for a Chinese delegation from Bright Food, the Chinese conglomerate looking to acquire United Biscuits, owners of Jaffa Cakes, McVitie’s and Jacob’s amongst other British household names.

It struck me that this is very much a deal of our times. A Chinese buyer of a Western brand. A deal that goes some way at mitigating the insatiable appetite (excuse the pun) of its domestic consumer market. At a time when grain prices are soaring, food security is high up the agenda of most nations. By buying United Biscuits, Bright Food can lock in some important contracts for the raw components, palm oil and wheat, of UB’s products agreed when prices were lower.

Aside from the political and social characteristics of this deal, it will be fascinating to see China’s approach when it comes to selling and marketing non-Chinese products in non-Chinese markets.

Global e-Learning growing

Our work with organisations in all sorts of industries provides us with a fortunate position to see how business trends are evolving in the translation and localisation space. As localisation and internationalisation strategies play a greater importance for our clients we’re seeing those trends start earlier and earlier in their infancy.

Recently we’ve seen a surge in the flow of requests from clients for the localisation of global e-learning programmes. E-learning makes sense on a lot of levels for organisations with international workforces. It’s a cost-efficient learning medium and, if localised correctly, delivers a uniform training solution across language and culture. As more global organisations engage freelance consultants and incorporate flexible working practices into their HR policies, e-learning further proves its worth.

e-Learning localisation programmes can deliver enormous benefits to organisations who choose to roll them out. Just as a website user is 4x more likely to perform an action if the site is in their native language, an adult educated to university level in a foreign language has only around a quarter of the vocabulary compared to a native speaker. For learning to be truly effective it’s therefore necessary to deliver the programme in the students’ native tongues. Costs can be minimised by following best practice authoring processes, limiting the use of video and using translation technology such as terminology management and translation memory software.

Unlike most industries, the recession and global economic slowdown was favourable for the learning and development sector. Faced with the need to retain skilled workers, organisations re-assessed their means of imparting knowledge and training for their staff. The fundamental future for e-Learning looks very bright now regardless of how the economic conditions pan out. A recent market research report forecast the e-Learning industry to reach $107.3 billion* in value by 2015 with the primary growth drivers behind its success cited as being cost reductions, flexibility and the needs of dispersed, global workforces. If you are planning global e-learning programmes please get in touch with us via our main contact details to discuss your training objectives for an obligation-free proposal on how we can help.

* http://www.strategyr.com/eLEARNING_Market_Report.asp

Language Connect hosts work experience programme

As part of its commitment to the Business Language Champions scheme, Language Connect has developed a work experience programme aimed at providing GCSE students with an introductory understanding of the key areas of the business.

Through taking part in a two-week work experience onsite, students are given the opportunity to consolidate the skills they have learnt in the classroom, as well as gain experience of other disciplines required in the workplace.

Kasia was the first Convent of Jesus and Mary Language College student to take part in this scheme. Kasia worked alongside Language Connect employees in the Sales, Operations, Finance and Administration functions. The two weeks culminated in a one-on-one interview with Ben Taylor, Language Connect’s Managing Partner, who took time to explain how Language Connect was set up and shared his vision about the Company’s future.
Kasia’s teacher wrote, ‘’I bumped into Kasia at lunchtime today and she told me she was really delighted and thought it was a very positive and helpful experience. Thanks again for providing the school with this opportunity. I hope we will be able to do more joint work next year.’’

Export Connections

As one of only 33 economies to grow during the recent GFC, Australia is a real success story–thanks in large part to its exporters. As a frequent attendee of export sector events, I am continually impressed by the government assistance offered to Australia’s dynamic export sector. But at times the sheer number of organizations, consultancies and programs available to Australian Exporters is overwhelming. Thankfully at the recent Import/Export On the Road Seminar Series, participants were provided with a (completed) jigsaw to show how all the government organizations slotted together—phew at last I was able to make sense of it all!

Although I have attended some fantastically informative seminars and shows, I am always a bit surprised that the issue of language is seldom addressed. Our prime Asian markets are tantalizing to be sure, but they are populated by immense numbers of non-Anglophones. China for example, now our largest export market, is an extremely diverse society linguistically and culturally. The large number of dialects alone, is likely to cause confusion to the novice, and is best addressed by contacting an experienced language provider like Language Connect. We are happy to advise on every step of the translation process. Often, however, Exporters will only realize their need for language services at the last minute, which can result in undue stress and very tight deadlines. Contacting a language service provider in advance can ease your path to global success.

How does a new (or seasoned Exporter) navigate the often treacherous waters of translation (the written word) or interpreting (the spoken word)? There are many routes to take. I was alarmed recently when a client said he was going to hire his neighbour’s bilingual son for Korean interpreting. Thankfully he called Language Connect instead and avoided the potential dangers of miscommunication. Those first few meetings are not the time for ambiguities, and are the perfect time to show the correct level of respect and professionalism by ensuring you have a trained Interpreter at your side.

Many Australian businesses employ the language skills of their existing staff. Although, asking a bilingual colleague to conduct a translation or interpreting project is common practice, it really is far from ideal. The level of responsibility placed on someone without the appropriate training and expertise is a risky one, and it is always safest to source a professional. It is easy to assume that translating is just the swapping of words and phrases from one language to another. If it was only that simple! Professional Translators and Interpreters study for years (often to post-graduate level) and may then hone their skills with research into a number of specialities including: healthcare, legal, mining, manufacturing and more. By contacting an ISO Accredited language provider like Language Connect, you can ensure multilingual requirements are handled by professionals.

So what are the documents that you may need translated? Well they could include export certificates, food labels, emails, websites, promotional materials, contracts and incoterms (International Commercial Terms). You may require certification for legal reasons, formatting, desktop publishing and other auxiliary services. All things to consider, before you embark on your international venture.

The good news is that you’re not alone. Australian Exporters have the following organizations to assist:

www.diird.vic.gov.au Department of Innovation, Industry & Regional Development: www.dfat.gov.au Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; www.aiex.com.au Australian Institute of Export; http://aiex.com.au/programs/flex/flex FLex Future Leaders in Export; http://export.business.vic.gov.au/ Business Victoria Export Connections; www.business.nsw.gov.au/business/exporterassistance/ NSW Department of State and Regional Development; www.importexportshow.com.au Import Export Show: www.tradeaustralia.com.au Trade Australia; www.chinablueprint.com.au China Blueprint; www.thinkglobal.com.au Think Global; http://www.dsbn.com.au/articles/exporting/art_exp_AssistanceforNSWExporters.asp The NSW Exporters Network; www.australianexporters.net Australian Exporter; www.efic.gov.au Export Finance & Insurance Corp; www.exporters.sbdc.com.au Small Business Exporters Network; www.austrade.gov.au Austrade; www.efic.gov.au Export Finance & Finance & Insurance Corp & www.languageconnect.com.au Language Connect