Creating a successful international strategy with AI and localization

Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about the importance of localization in your business strategy. Joining us is Matija Kovac, who is the co-founder and head of development at Taia Translations, which is a modern translation platform where they help companies translate their documents, websites, and other content with an AI-assisted human perfected translation platform. And today, Matija and I are going to discuss why localization is critical for international business.

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Alright, here’s the first part of my conversation with Matija Kovac, the co-founder and Head of Development at Taia Translations. Matija, welcome to the Voices of Search podcast.

Hi, Ben, thanks for having me.

Excited to have you on the show and thank you in advance for allowing me to butcher the pronunciation of your name. The Slavic names are a little difficult for me to pronounce. Give it to me one time just so I could hear what it sounds like.

So it’s Matija Kovac from Taia Translations.

It sounds so much nicer when you say it, maybe you should be the host today.

I’ve been told I have a radio voice, so let’s try.

You do. But hair for a video you got great hair too.

And hair for video. For audio.

All right. Well, everybody, you’re going to have to check out Matija’s LinkedIn profile to see the epic hair and, that said, he is not just a well-dressed, well-groomed man. He’s also an expert on localization, which is hopefully relevant to SEO. Let’s talk a little bit about that… Matija, why is localization so critical for international business?

Well, we’re starting to work more with companies that are in this stage of very fast growth and don’t have a localization process in place. And what we’re seeing is that we can help these companies grow their revenue and grow their user base much faster by getting into multiple different markets, by exploring different levels of localization, and achieving a much faster growth than they would just by growing in a single language market. So imagine you’re a company from Germany, let’s say. And if you’re only targeting your audience in German, you have a very narrow audience at some stage, so even though Germany is a very big economy with a lot of people, there are a lot of limits. But once you start exploring localization, start investing in it. You can start growing much faster across the board.

You mentioned that there are levels of localization, and I think that’s an interesting way to frame it. I’m here in the United States and we have English, and most Americans think that English is the language that should be spoken pretty much everywhere and get frustrated when they go somewhere and they speak a different language, right, with a very sheltered life. But that said, there are a couple of different flavors of localization that maybe people here in the states don’t think about where we think of localization, and it’s the difference between English, as in American English. And maybe there’s some translation into Spanish, but really, that’s probably not something that we’re thinking about very much locally until we go to different countries. And then it’s well, alright. Let’s just translate the words that are on the page and slap-up another domain with a dot.com, dot-something, and hope we have a localized language, but really, it’s much more complicated than that. You’re from Slovenia, am I correct?

Yes, I’m from Slovenia.

It’s the home of Luka Doncic.

Luka Doncic; one and only yeah.

Probably mispronouncing his name as well. My favorite…

Actually, it was very good.

Thank you. I watched a lot of basketball, and in countries like yours, where generally the actual territory is smaller, but also your neighbors speak different languages. Becomes more of a problem. So talk to me about some of the levels of localization, not just international localization. You have to think about different languages in the same countries and also sometimes you’re using the same language, but you still have to localize it. Talk to me about those levels…

Right, so as you mentioned, I come from Slovenia. It’s a very small place. There are only two million of us and we normally start learning a foreign language when we’re about four or five years old, maybe six. And most Slovenians would speak at least one or two foreign languages. And some of us, a lot of us, go into studying languages as well. Myself, I learned English when I was very little already in primary school, and then I studied German and then Italian. And then I went to the university and I learned Chinese and all of us speak a little bit of Croatian because that’s where we go for our holiday. That’s where we keep our sailing boats and our condos and stuff like that.

One of my favorite places in the world, we went to Croatia for my honeymoon. Oh my god, it’s so beautiful.

You see, I get to go there every week and that’s awesome because it’s such a small country. I can just drive for an hour and I’m in Croatia. But what it also brings with it is aside from all the cultural mixes and getting the best Italian coffee, but also the Wiener schnitzel from Austria, it also brings in a lot of issues when you’re trying to expand your markets. So already when I started my first company in 2014, very quickly we came to our limitations. When it comes to market size for only two million people, there are just so many things you can sell right? So at some stage, you start looking abroad and you start figuring out how to get into other markets, and localization is the only way to do it right. And as I mentioned earlier, there are multiple different levels of localization. So with the high growth of machine translation quality since probably since 2016, when Google introduced their first neural machine translation solution and Google Translate suddenly wasn’t a joke anymore. The machine translation industry has gone through the roof. It has seen tremendous growth, and the improvement in the quality of machine translation output is really good. So this is already your first level of localization. You can have everything you have translated very, very quickly and very efficiently, but with a lower quality. So it’s not going to be as good as if a human translated, but it might do the case specifically in SEO. So let’s say you are, you were running an e-commerce platform or your store, and you have, let’s say, 10000 different products in your shop. You don’t have the funds to translate all of these products into all of the languages you want to aim for. But what you can do is you can translate all of them using machine translation and get them on the local market in another country and see how they react and see how your SEO positions can help your growth and grow the business there. And once you know which products and which categories are interesting to the local market, that’s when you can start investing in proper human-assisted or AI-assisted but human-perfected translations. Then again, there are multiple levels of that.

Let me poke some holes here. I understand the philosophy of… And we go through this with transcriptions of the podcast. We will do a 10 cent a minute transcription of our podcast that we give to our team internally that they use to pull out show notes and quotes. But we would never publish that piece of content. We would spend the dollar per minute to get a human-vetted transcription, right? And so there are different levels of cost depending on the amount of attention you want to pay to the content. The problem that I have so talk me through this is you’re saying, well, use the 10 cents a minute version of a translation, see where there is demand for your products and services, and then double back and decide to spend the dollar version to go through the translations. But how do you know if what is causing specific products to have better conversion rates is not necessarily the quality of the translation? Maybe somebody is getting to a page. The translation isn’t any good, so they’re saying this obviously isn’t a professional company. I’m not going to buy the products. How do you know the problems, the translation, or the product?

Well, yeah, there’s obviously this limitation that you just mentioned. So you have to be very careful about not having huge bounce rates just because your translation quality is poor. What you can do is you can learn from your existing markets. So let’s go back to the German example we had before. You were a German company, you want to expand into France. Let’s say there’s not such a giant difference between these two markets, right? So the product that might sell well in Germany might also sell well in France. So you might start investing in those sorts of products earlier, but before you have to invest heavily into the localization and don’t be mistaken, it’s not a very low cost if you want to do it properly. Even with all the AI- assistance that we can offer, you can go ahead and have everything translated with just a machine translation because you will start building traffic and you will start getting your SEO rates higher than if you were to wait before you have the funds to be able to translate everything perfectly. But as you said earlier, it really depends on the level of engagement you’re expecting. So we would always recommend our clients to translate their home page with the translation, with editing and proofreading. So ATP service, that’s the highest quality that you can probably find. We have AI and three professional humans on top of that to make sure that it all sounds perfectly natural and no one in that local market is ever going to figure out that this is actually a translation. Whereas for some other uses, a proofreader might not be necessary for your legal content, but the advisor would be. So if you have your terms and conditions, for example, you’d want to make sure that those are properly translated, but you don’t have to sound very marketing dramatic, localized entirely for the local region. Whereas with some content, let’s say your blog posts and stuff like that, that’s mostly there to generate content and generate traffic and maybe inform the audience, but it doesn’t have such a high value in your overall web presence. In those cases, you probably would be perfectly fine with just machine translation that’s edited by a human to make sure that it’s actually correct. But you don’t need all of this huge investment. But it really depends on the client, their budgets and obviously their entire needs.

I think of this as building a product. You have an MVP. You’re coming up with a baseline. You know that it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to work. So I guess the question is, are the machine learning transcriptions good enough to drive conversions, gain a signal from your blog post, figure out where there is demand? Or do you actually have to integrate humans into that process?

Exactly. It’s very similar to building a company and having an MVP first and then building on top of that wants to see some traction.

OK, so talk to me a little bit about the strategy of localization you mentioned. Start with the sort of MVP style, then go through the more resource-consuming process of building out true translations. But there are some other problems that you run into here, where you’re not just translating word for word in a language, you’re also dealing with cultural nuances. How do you figure out not only are the words resonating but are you writing what’s relevant for the specific culture?

Yeah. So this is where collaborating with your translation team comes into place. So not even 10 years ago, localizing all of your company’s presence online was in the domain of companies who had huge assets who were able to build entire teams dedicated exclusively to localization. You would usually have a localization manager and then 10, maybe even 30 or more people in the company whose sole job is to make sure that their content gets translated into local markets and that it’s translated with the company voice, and that they follow certain guidelines and all of that. There was a lot of manual back and forth and emails sending up and down and all that. But with platforms like what we’re building, what we have here at Taia, things are getting much more simplified. So basically our goal is to be able to allow anyone inside your company, be it a marketing member, a marketing team member or a legal team member, or sales or whoever needs to get something translated to have it translated easily and effectively. So they don’t have to go through a specific localization department. They don’t have to have any special skills or any training. It’s a platform that’s so easy to use that if you show it to your mom, she should be able to use it instantly because it’s just a few clicks away.

That sometimes is more challenging than what you think it is. My mom is a textile artist and I built her website, BarbaraShapiro.com. And when she wants to launch a newsletter, I still have to walk her through some stuff.

Alright. Well, I’ll be curious if she ever wants to translate anything into us as is Spanish for Latin America.

Actually, oddly enough, my mom is a language expert in addition to being a textile artist and translates textile books from English to French and French to English, but nevertheless enough of the Barbara Shapiro show. I think what you’re saying is that the cost for localization has gone down dramatically. So, you know, help me benchmark what…

Not only the costs but the process itself as through the use of technology and through the use of not an only neural translation but also other text, it’s become much more accessible. Anyone in your company can start getting content translated now, and they don’t have to be a very educated person around this topic.

So help me understand the differences where it projects on. You mentioned an e-commerce website with 10000 pages five years ago. What was the cost and timing to translate that content for a new market then, and then what the comparison to what it is now.

On the one hand, depends on how you get your content across. So five to 10 years ago, APIs were not as common as they are now, so having stuff integrated and interconnected was a bit more complex and nowadays it’s much simpler, right? So this is the first major threshold where you can get your content across to your localization provider of choice in a much easier fashion than you would five or 10 years ago. So when we were just starting out with this company, most of the market was… About 99 percent of the market was still dominated by traditional language service providers or translation agencies, or however, you want to call them. And these guys usually didn’t have such high levels of technical skills or be able to integrate with their many products or be able to translate as fast using technology that’s out there. So we set out to change all of that, and we might not be the only company doing this sort of thing, but we do have some very special things that we’re pretty excited about. So nowadays what happens is that you would probably integrate using an API and get all the products across as they’re being input into your platform. So as soon as you launch a new product in your German shop, it’s already going to be halfway translated or even fully machine translated and available to your French audience, so you’re not wasting any time when launching a new product. That’s the first really important thing. And on top of that, you really reduce the amount of human workload necessary to get your content across. So that’s the first thing we solved. The second thing that you can do here is, as I mentioned earlier, you can have everything pre-translated with a machine translation. And once our system learns from your existing content and once you build up your translation memory, there’s a high chance that this machine translation is going to be very high quality and might not even need human interference at any point. But once you have all this content already in the platform and it’s already pre-translated with the machine translation, it’s much easier for human translators to just go ahead and added, postdated the machine translation, and have everything done much more efficiently than if they were translating by hand from scratch and typing everything down right.

I understand that there’s a technical change where it’s easier to share your content. You’re taking advantage of some of the advanced technologies today. I’m still going to hold your feet to the fire. If it used to cost me $100,000 to translate 10,000 pages and I’m going from English to French and Spanish. What’s the cost now?

It really depends on the quality of service you’re expecting, so it can be either one penny for word or it can be up to, let’s say, 20 pennies per word, depending on how much human interaction you require. And how much of a high quality you expect, but this is now. Five or 10 years without any AI assistance and without any fancy integrations, it could easily have come up even to, let’s say, 35 or 50 pennies per word and two that can sum up to quite high costs.

So what I’m hearing is the translations have not only got easier from a technical perspective, which makes it more efficient for you to implement translations as you’re building your content. But also, the cost of translation has gone down because we’re able to leverage technologies that we’re talking about going from 35 to 50 cents to 10 to 20. So more than a 50 percent drop in your overall costs over the last five to 10 years for translations.

Perhaps something like that, but the most important part is that it’s much, much faster. So if it took a week to get something translated five years ago, it’s usually up to 48 hours now. It’s much more efficient.

And time is money, so again, more efficient. Alright, that wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Matija Kovac, the co-founder and head of development at Taia Translations. Join us again tomorrow when we publish our second part of this conversation. When Matija and I continue our conversations talking about building translation memory. If you can’t wait until our next episode and you’d like to learn more about Matija, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. Or you could visit his company’s website, which is Taia.io., and also a special thanks to Deep Crawl for sponsoring this podcast. It’s time for you to be smart, like the SWAT teams at Adobe, eBay, Twitch, PayPal, Microsoft, and Canva, who use Deep Crawl to monitor their site performance. To ensure that your site reaches its full revenue potential. Visit Deepcrawl.com that’s deepcrawl.com for the number one platform for technical SEO. And don’t forget to check out our newest show, the Revenue Generator podcast, which tells how innovators of the revenue generation orchestrate teams that deliver world-class customer experiences through the integration of data, SaaS, people, and processes to expedite demand and increase revenue. So if you’re ready to join the revenue generation, search for revenue generator in your podcast app or head over to revgenpod.com, that search for revenue generator in your podcast app, or head over to Revgenpod.com. Just one more link in our show notes I’d like to tell you about if you didn’t have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voices of Search.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also send us your topics, suggestions, or your SEO questions, and you can even apply to be a guest speaker on the Voices of Search podcast. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voices of search on Twitter, and my personal handle is Ben J. Sharp. And if you haven’t subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we’re going to publish an episode every day during the workweek. So hit the Subscribe button and your podcast app and we’ll be back in your feed in the next business day. All right, that’s it for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.