Last month I had the opportunity to present at the Translation Automation User Society’s (TAUS) Industry Leaders Forum. The event brings together major buyers and sellers of translation to discuss trends in the industry and share how they are tackling challenges around translation. Participants included familiar names in the translation industry such as Lionbridge, WeLocalize, and Smartling, as well as household brands like Adobe, Facebook, and even John Deere (yes, the farming equipment makers)!

The forum’s objective was to identify opportunities for collaboration in four key areas: Changing Business Models, Big Data, Standards and Best Practices, and Metrics for Quality Evaluation. The event started with four to six participants presenting under each of the key themes; I presented under Changing Business Models and shared how Gengo’s focus on quality has allowed our platform to scale to millions of translation units per month.

After the initial presentations, “break out sessions” were formed for participants to discuss in detail two to three key challenges and suggestions for solving them. As the presentations and discussions progressed over the two days, I found two recurring themes quite interesting.

What’s driving translation?

The first recurring theme was how the demand — or driver — for translation was changing. A few presentations touched on how the content being translated was becoming shorter and more social. John Deere for example was finding that translating manuals was not enough any more. Their potential customers were going online to review what other customers were saying. In the past, translating an instruction manual was necessary after a sale, but these days potential customers are looking for reviews before deciding. So it’s valuable for John Deere to provide their product reviews for languages in new target markets.

In line with John Deere’s findings, Lionbridge observed that “localization is … no longer following the corporation’s global expansion strategy, but rather leading it.” As many online platforms know, social media and product reviews are increasingly important before a sale. And at Gengo we’re finding more and more of this type of content coming through our platform; it’s now a significant portion of our translation volume. In fact, at Gengo you’ll hear some of us say “reviews drive sales!”.

What is translation quality?

The other recurring theme was a shifting expectation and definition of “quality”. Traditionally, translation quality has been about monitoring and measuring accuracy, meaning, grammar, etc. These will always be important, and at Gengo we’ve established ways for our translators to monitor their output quality with Performance Scorecards. But as the TAUS presenters discussed the expectations of a new and growing customer base, it was clear that quality is also increasingly about customer impact. The ability to translate translations to sales (pun intended!) is now a key metric in measuring the “quality” — or success — of a translation.

While the industry is debating how we can standardize metrics for impact, there’s consensus that clicks, revenue, and other metrics are increasingly important in deciding what to translate. From our own experience at Gengo, we know that these factors also play a significant role in deciding how to translate. In fact, one of the key reasons our customers like Rakuten choose Gengo is the measurable increases in conversion rates they can achieve by combining natural-sounding human translation with crowd-scale speed. In Rakuten’s case, they observed a 16% increase in conversions on product pages that were translated with Gengo’s platform. You can read more about this and other facts in our Going Global reports.

I was excited to see at TAUS that Gengo’s vision and values are in sync with important changes happening in the industry — changes that will make translation available everywhere, affordably, and on a vast scale that we can only imagine today. We’re looking forward to continuing the discussion at the TAUS Annual Conference in October, in Portland!

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