Entrepreneurship, Translation Quality Assurance, and Business Growth

I’m Paul Urwin and welcome to the Proz.com Podcast, where we discuss everything translation-and-interpreting related. Including how to get new clients, areas of specialization, technical skills, software localization, machine translation, diversification and more, Proz.com, helping freelance translators and interpreters succeed.

Hey there, Paul here. This is Episode 51 of the Proz.com Podcast and today we have the fantastic Marko Hozjan talking about entrepreneurship, quality assurance, and business growth. That’s coming up in just a second. Don’t forget to head on over to training.proz.com. to check out the new workshops we have. This month we have “How to overcome perfectionism and imposter syndrome” with Bettina Radish, and we have “Editing and proofreading” with Karen Tkachuk. So those are two of this month’s highlights, but there are plenty of other workshops on the platform as well as self-paced courses that you can join at any time. Self-paced courses on transcreation, voice-over, how to get more clients, and many others. So that’s training.proz.com. Right, time now for our interview with Marko Hozjan. Marko is a CEO at Taia Translations Ltd. He’s a serial entrepreneur, an angel investor, a leadership and company culture enthusiast, a mentor, a Rotarian, and a sailor. Marko, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Oh, great to be here and great to be talking about quality assurance today, a very important topic. But first of all, Marko, please tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got started in this industry.

Yeah, thank you. So firstly, I’m not from the industry, I’m a serial entrepreneur. I founded many companies, I had two small exits, but otherwise, this is the first company where I’m in any way included in the translation industry. The whole idea came out of the language school, which is one of the companies that me and my partner Matija had before this and we still have it. It’s a local language school; it’s the biggest language school here in the country. Otherwise, from there, the idea arose because we got first demands for translating because people or companies turned to us to see if we could translate something, and at the time, we opened a so-called traditional LSP or a translation agency. But we quickly found that when competing against others, in the end only the price is the question. So then we started to look for some pragmatic solutions and we started Taia.

Very interesting, very interesting. So one company was the language school, what was the other company if I could ask?

So, I was able to build the biggest nautical school in the Balkans. So it’s where people could get different nautical licenses, there was sailing school, etc. So we had offices in Ljubljana and Croatia, and thousands of thousands of people made licenses in my school and I sold it because during the years, having had a lot of companies, it proved to me that I don’t want to work in companies where you cannot exponentially scale. And with the nautical school, I found that as well, so that’s why at one point I decided to sell it. Otherwise, I had a marketing agency, I had a company that built electrical grids, etc. but now I’m fully invested in Taia because I see that this company can scale exponentially, not only locally but globally.

Brilliant, brilliant. Okay, fascinating, fascinating stuff. Okay, so then what happened is through your language school, you started to get inquiries about translation work and that’s what sort of started this whole journey into translation. Is that right?

Exactly.

Okay, perfect. So I can understand that, and then you mentioned going down the traditional LSP route.

Yes.

So again, I think lots of people have actually gone down a similar path, in some ways, of moving from a language school into translation in some form, and then – just that bit you said at the end there – and then you realize that the traditional setup wasn’t going to work for you, and therefore you have a nontraditional setup. So tell us a little bit about that place.

Sure. So when we started, we didn’t have any USPs where we could be better than others – other USPs or even tech companies, as we call them now, within the translation field. So we said we didn’t want to play this game. And at the time, since we consider ourselves tech-savvy, we started to discover different USPs that we can get through technology and just a bit of a different business model. So firstly, we started to solve the USP of speed through automation. So firstly, we made our own uploader. So for example, a customer could drag and drop a document – more than 60 file types supported – get an immediate analysis of the filing seconds after, even with repetitions, and then get an immediate offer, choose the service and order, for example. And then we added a lot of points of automation throughout the PM process and forward. And then we started to add other features and other USPs mostly with technology so that our customers would get a less painful experience when it comes to needing a translation service.

Okay, so it’s all about efficiency through tech, would that be it?

Yes, it’s most definitely the case. Exactly.

Okay. Wonderful, wonderful. And how long have you been running that company for?

So, the company started in 2017 as a traditional LSP. We needed about a year to figure out that this wouldn’t work, and then at the end of 2018, Taia was born. Taia is a platform and we’ve been building it since then. So 2018, we received a first – we call it a pre-angel investment, and in 2020, we received a pre-seed investment of 1.2 million at the time. So together, 1.4 with all the investments that helped us build Taia as a platform as it is today and to help us grow, for now mostly over western Europe, but now we’ve focused actually globally.

Yeah, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Yeah. I love talking about growth and scaling and I remember many years ago, I used to think that sort of 20% year-on-year growth was pretty good. And I guess it’s not bad for a traditional business. But yeah, and when you’re dealing with a global marketplace and you have these tech efficiencies, I can understand that someone like you would be looking to scale much faster than that and at a much higher rate. So have you seen significant growth in the last three years, Marko? How’s that worked out for you?

We have, of course. So our growth is about 300% annually which is something that we’re sort of satisfied with because we’re very ambitious. So we want to continue with this growth – even when the company gets larger and usually the growth gets a bit slower – but we want to continue with it because we see a big opportunity in the markets. The translation market is one of the most interesting ones. So we know the size, we know that it’s bigger than a music industry but far less sexy than the music industry, for example. And the change here, because of automation, because of machine translation is so rapid, this wave of automation is really changing the market, killing a lot of vendors or LSPs that do not want to change, but at the same time opening so many opportunities for others that embrace change, or embrace technology and at the end, the customer will have all of the benefits.

Brilliant, brilliant. Yeah. Thanks for that. That’s immense, isn’t it? 300% a year. That’s immense growth. So yeah, congratulations on having achieved that. Right at the end there, Marko, you mentioned benefits for customers. So just talk me through a couple of those benefits because I think that’s important.

So from our side, as I mentioned, speed already. So, it comes with automation, it starts with just receiving a quote for something that they need. Then secondly, Taia is a platform that offers a variety of different services. So for example, when you come on the platform, firstly, we ask you do you want to outsource your translations or do you want to do them yourself? So for example, one part of our platform enables you to upload different documents or order different translation services, choose your level of quality, choose the time by which you need it, and just order. The other part is the part where we enable customers – this is another big trend that we’ve seen in the industry because of the TMs and MTs and all of the tech enabling it – that we give the power to the customer for them to translate on their own. So, Catapult is one part of Taia, which is a sort of software service subscription-based, where customers can just upload their documents, get them pre-MT translated, correct them, MT post-edit them and download them in the same formatting. So this is the second part. And the third part that we’re issuing soon is so-called machine translation as a professional service.

So we know that in a few years – I don’t know, this is 5, 10 years, we don’t know – everything that we see here or even feel will be translated so mostly by MT. And what is missing is the part where people need MT as a professional service where other services are surrounding it. So, for example, you need a document MT-translated but you need formatting to stay intact; you want to MT post-edit a document but you want the computer to learn from your corrections; or you’re translating something but you’re not satisfied with the quality and you can immediately order someone to review it and so on. So, MT is a professional service. So I would say the second LSP is the variety of services all within one platform.

The third thing that is becoming more and more important is the safety of your documents. For example, sending files over email is one of the least safe things you can do. How this usually happens is you send a file to a translation agency – to an LSP – this file is being sent around different PMs, translators, somewhere in Taiwan, working in their pajamas on an unsecured computer, then all of these files stay in their email inboxes forever and can be exploited later in time. While with us, using a secure platform, all in one, where translators can’t even download the documents, they work in the Cloud, the documents are not permanently saved, and so on. So it adds a couple of layers of security at the end.

So the last part, the part we’re talking about now, is of course quality. All of that has to be embraced by quality. And quality is something where I think the industry has been innovative at least. So quality is still very much embraced by very strict processes, ISO certificates, people following rules translators following instructions.

Okay, brilliant. All right, well, thanks for all of that. Marko, let’s really dive into quality assurance. And let’s start off by talking about what a client wants and how that perception might differ from the freelance translator’s side as well. So I’m just going to give you a couple of ideas to start discussing. I mean, one idea that I have is that the translator always believes that the client always wants the highest quality, which I don’t think is necessarily the case. And of course, these are sweeping generalizations, they’re just meant to get us talking really. And the other one is this image that comes to mind of the good, fast and cheap -and you can only have two of them. So you can have something that’s good and fast, but not cheap. So there’s this sort of tradeoff between the speed, the quality and the cost. And yeah, obviously, quality is really important, but also, price is often a factor, it’s often seen as a factor, and then we have cost as well. So that’s just a bit of a mumbled introduction from me, Marko, but where do you want to start us off?

You gave me many ideas about where to start. So what you mentioned is a very well-known triangle where the customer sometimes wants it all but cannot get it. So the first thing that I will touch upon is the ignorance of the customer, which is a big problem that all of the LSPs or other companies have. So there is a big percentage of customers, of buyers of translation products, unfortunately, that does not have enough knowledge about what different products mean. Let me give you an example. As you mentioned, some customers order a translation, for example, without proofreading, without revision, and so on and they expect a perfect translation. What is even more problematic is that sometimes customer needs to order something that is called transcreation or something very similar, but they order a translation. So what we have to do, and what actually every translation company needs to do, is educate their customers. This is a big part of the process that unfortunately we need to do, and I’m sure that every company has a similar problem. So customers order something where they don’t know what it is or expect something else than what is offered.

This is why we actually created a platform as it is because when a customer, for example, uploads a file, they can choose the level of the quality that they need and this quality is very much explained there. So we have a toggle where a customer can choose five different quality ratio. So it all goes from MT to MT+ light review, where a translator just goes through and corrects the most obvious mistakes to a translation + revision and the MTP. So the customer chooses their quality, which is very rare in the industry. We were actually the first to introduce this; we give the power to the customer so that the customer sees that there are many options. And what we realized is that many times, customers are not looking for top quality. So for example, we had a case where because of their ISO certification they needed something translated by the following day and no one wanted to take the job. But they needed it for their ISO certification. They were in the automobile industry, they needed something translated but it was not necessary to be high quality. So for example, they could choose MT or MT + light review and it could be translated in one day. And then we had another case with a newspaper house where the journalist didn’t speak English, but they got thousands of articles from writers where they only needed to read the abstract and the abstract didn’t need to be fully translated or translated to a high quality. It was just for them to understand the context, and then they chose a specific article so someone could translate that in full quality, for example. So there are many, many cases where customers do not need high quality and vice versa, there are many cases where they want something else from what they ordered and again, they think it’s a quality issue but mostly it’s an issue of ignorance of which translation products actually exist.

We have more and more cases where high quality isn’t something that customers actually need. Then we have another case of customers ordering something where they don’t know which products they can choose from or what a translation actually is, what’s the difference between translation, transcreation or TEP, and so on.

Oh, yeah. Okay. So I was going to pick up on the point about client education. And I think that’s right, that you point that out, but I’m a little bit concerned about that. Because when you’re, let’s say, offering translation services, it’s quite a task to educate your client at that point in time, isn’t it?

Exactly, it is.

And I’ve heard from people who offer transcreation services, I think they perhaps go down a similar path where they feel that a lot of education work is required and I can see that. I’m just wondering, how much work is that on top of all of the other processes that you already manage?

It’s not so much work. It’s a part of the process where a customer gets onboarded. It really depends – usually with bigger clients where they have their own localization managers or their translation departments, this is not the case. They understand what the difference is. This is mostly the case with SMEs, smaller companies, or growing companies that are only setting up their translation needs or processes. They are the ones who might need some help with how it works, what’s the difference between different services etc.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. And yeah, I think the differential pricing model is a very interesting one as well, and I’d like us to bring in the translators and talk about it from their point of view as well in just a second. But if we have, for example, differential pricing, one of the things I’ve said quite a few times recently is that there’s just simply too much content out there for translators to translate. So if we don’t go down the MT route or I think you call it MT light in your company, then we’re simply not going to be able to get through this volume. And I like the example you gave of that, you know, in the car industry, if someone wanted something very quickly and you were able to give them that solution. So I think differential pricing has a place. What would you say to freelance translators who might be struggling with this idea and have you talked to translators specifically about it? Do you think a translator should be offering differential pricing as well?

Yes, why not? So firstly, what is being felt is big fear of MT within the translation community but I don’t think that is really necessary. It’s very similar to an industrial revolution or anything else. So the translation market is changing and of course, a translator’s profile, their job is changing, but that that doesn’t mean that they’re going to stay jobless, it just means that they need to change the way they’re operating. The first obvious change came from translating to MT post-editing, which now is becoming a norm. But even that is going to change more and more, the post-editing process is going to change to something more of a proofread, transcreation, and so on. So for example, a lot of opportunities are going to stay in the creative sphere, in the marketing sphere, in very technical spheres, and so on, which means that translators or vendors need to become a bit more entrepreneurial in a way that they need to change the way that they’re offering their services within the environment itself. So yeah, that means that, for example, charging differently or offering different services, not only translation, but for example, a light review of something or even MT post-editing as a service is definitely something that translators aren’t using enough as a niche opportunity.

I think there’s a lot of translators out there that state from the beginning, they simply don’t like MT post-editing, it’s not for them and the rates are too low. I think that’s something that I’ve heard quite a few times.

Exactly, exactly. But this has changed dramatically. So there was a lot of negative talk about MT post-editing but this has changed. I think the translation community has started to embrace this and they see now that this isn’t a threat, it’s something that they can actually get more out of. So they’re now able to translate 4, 5, 6 times faster than they did before, and just by positioning themselves in the right way, they can actually earn more than they did before.

Very, very interesting Marko, and I can completely believe that, and I think there must be quite a few people out there doing this already, and so I suppose if you are a freelance translator listening to this, it might be something that you’ve shied away from or that you’ve sort of rejected in the past, but perhaps now might be the right time to at least have another look at what’s going on with MT post-editing.

Yeah. So of course, it’s not easy and of course, it changes your perception of things. So, for example, for traditional linguists, when speaking about quality, there were only a few ways in which quality could be achieved. And, for example, one of the things that they spoke about is that the MT itself influences the way that you read it, the way that you change it, the way that you understand the text and then the end output. But since this is inevitable, you need to find solutions here. So as the whole system changes to more and more freelancing jobs, to a more and more entrepreneurial spirit that everyone needs to have, it’s the same here. So even if a freelancer does not have this entrepreneurial spirit, I think that the environment keeps changing so much that you need to have it. So there is no way out.

Yeah, to kind of look at new opportunities from a different perspective.

Yeah, exactly.

Brilliant, brilliant. Okay, excellent, excellent stuff, Marko. And let’s talk specifically about a quality process – let’s take perhaps one of your quality processes. I’m imagining in the range of services, one of the higher priced translation services that you offer is maybe the translation, editing, proofreading, I believe, as the highest tier.

Yeah, exactly.

Marko, what would that include or what do you think that should include in terms of a quality process?

Sure. So the process needs to be very well defined. The people in the process need to be on board with it and need to follow it, otherwise mistakes happen and they shouldn’t. When it comes to TEP, TEP should be something that at the end is flawless. It is what was expected at the beginning. So for example, how the process looks, when we get an order the first very important part is the PM who gets the order. So there are a lot of things. They are checking the documents, checking for context mismatches. So for example, if you get an Excel sheet with 100 words needing to be translated for a web store, there is a big possibility of the context not being understood for example, because you have only words. So, does “buy” mean “buy” or does it mean “purchase” or does it mean “Add to Cart”, and so on. So, the first dam in this quality assurance process is the PM and then of course, choosing the right vendor with the vendor management – not only by language combination, of course, the branch of the service category is even more important – and so on. So actually, establishing the whole team from translator, editor and proofreader. And then when it goes from one to the other, the whole process looks very much like a factory. So when we speak about translation services, we speak about terminologies that are used in the automotive industry. So for example, Lean, Six Sigma are similar or very similar processes because we talk about sort of an assembly line that goes from PM to a translator, to reviser, to a proofreader, and at the end the PM again. So, all of these processes are very similar and in the end, again, PM is again the final dam to assure the translation quality. Even if the PM is not a native speaker of the language of the target or the source language, they can do a lot. So for example, using the quality assurance software, checking the changes that the revisor made and/or the proofreader made, and so on, and then just seeing if any of the text was lost, if any of the pictures were inside that had text and so on.

So, each person in the process has a very important role and the most important thing, this comes actually from Lean, is that each of the people within the process knows that if a mistake is made, that it will be very visible as to who made a mistake, because this is something that they learned in Toyota in the 80s. If the process was like that, if a worker on the assembly line knew that their mistakes could be hidden within the assembly line, they would make mistakes. But if the mistakes are very clear to see who made them, they become much more vigilant and responsible towards the job.

Brilliant, brilliant. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Yeah. Excellent. No, brilliant Marko. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for talking to us about quality. I think we’ve packed quite a lot into this very short episode, but you’ve shared certainly a lot of insights on quality and on processes, which I think are very important for something that is sometimes a little bit overlooked. So I’d just like to wrap up now by giving you the final word. If you would just like to give us a few more details about your company, if there’s anything that you’re particularly looking for in terms of translators, in terms of partners, in terms of alliances, if there’s just anything that you’d like to share in terms of quality or in terms of your company in general, and of course, please leave your details and your URL and so on, if anyone would like to get in touch.

Okay, Paul, thank you. So maybe for the final word, what Taia is. Taia is a translation/localization platform mostly for businesses and organizations that need translations, which means mostly for growing companies or SaaS companies, e-commerce, FinTech, E-learning and similar. But not only the platform, but the integrations are also important. So either way, the thing that influences the whole industry the most is technology and the way that the business is done internationally, which is again, very much connected to Tech. When it comes to document translations or interpreting or anything else, the quantity of content is rising exponentially and it will keep on rising because it’s very important for SEO optimizations, for exposure, etc., and we as Taia really want to be a part of this wave as I explained before, not as someone who is being killed by the wave but as someone who surfs it. And we see machine translation in general as our partner and not as our rival. We really want to send this message to other vendors to have the same attitude so that they can harvest the power of it, not as something that will take their job.

So either way, we are expanding now across Western Europe. Our main goal in the future years is the US market because it’s still the biggest market when it comes to translations. And of course, we’re looking for strategic partners, we’re looking for vendors, of course, for growing companies that are establishing their translation processes, for companies that need advanced tech support because we have our own dev team. So you’re very welcome to visit us at taia.io. Check out our platform, it’s free to use and that’s it.

So that’s taia.io, is that correct? Thank you. Taia.io, brilliant, brilliant. All right. Well, thank you so much, Marko. It’s been great talking to you today. I wish you every success with your business for the years ahead. Sounds like you’re doing fantastically well, you’re doing something just different in the industry, so yeah, many congratulations for that. And thank you so much for your time today.

Paul, thanks for having me. I’m excited about 2022 so hope to see you soon or talk again.

Brilliant, thanks so much. All the best. Bye.

Bye.

A big thank you to Marko for sharing such great value. He really has some brilliant insights into what’s going on in the industry, the direction of the industry, and I’m very grateful that he was able to come on the show and share some of those with us. Don’t forget to check out everything that’s going on at training.proz.com. Thanks so much for tuning in. All the very best and until next time, bye-bye.