Go Global, Be Global
Musings from LocWorld Portugal 2019
Aoife Murphy
Managing Director Europe, Think Global Forum
Major Accounts Director, Vistatec
It’s one thing to plan and execute your entry into a new market. But what comes next? How will you strengthen your brand? Support your customers? Maintain and grow your presence? Deal with local competitors? Align local needs with global strategy? How will you Be Global? — (source: LocWorld40)
Go Global, Be Global was the theme of this year’s LocWorld Europe which was held in the beautiful town of Estoril just outside Lisbon, Portugal. This conference brought together great minds in the localisation industry from both the Language Service Provider (LSP) and client-side to discuss experiences, challenges and new innovations when it comes to being global.
There was plenty to choose from in the various programme tracks and there was many a FOMO moment when it came to selecting sessions to attend. Fortunately, the folks at LocWorld share all the slideware with attendees afterward and there’s no shortage of opportunity to discuss the sessions with attendees over a coffee, lunch, and dinner.
The keynote speaker, Isabel Aguilera, author and strategy and innovation consultant, spoke about perspectives on being human in the digital age and put forward her algorithm for success in this environment of continual technological progress:
- Data (raw material)
- Intelligence (human and artificial)
- Innovation
- Collaboration
- Transparency and ethics
On the Content Management track, we heard from Shopify’s Melanie Clarke on how to ensure customer success in their preferred language. Melanie spoke about how Shopify extended language support to its customer care division and the importance of being able to communicate to customers in their own language. Melanie’s localisation team identified a champion for international within customer care so they could go about implementing best practice; creating style guides and applying the same principles from product translations which facilitated terminology consistency.
Continuing on the theme of being global, it was great to hear from Adobe’s Jeff Marques, just weeks after his presentation at Think Global Forum in New York. Jeff and his colleague Antonio Magalhaes spoke about how Adobe is overcoming the universal challenge of providing more localised content that is consistent across content types, to more customers, faster, and on a tight localisation budget. They explained how they are employing analytics to gather data on content visits globally and using this data to make decisions around what to localise. With a practical approach to machine translation, together with tooling, paid crowdsourcing and their self-help initiative for documentation, they continue to make huge progress.
The stand out session for me was from the Global Business track on ‘Globalization Teams as Enablers of Global Success: Tales from the Trenches’ hosted by Vistatec’s María Jesús de Arriba Díaz. Maria brought together a panel of senior localisation leaders comprising Patricia Borges (FM Global), Charlotte Cole (Farfetch) and Claire Pagès (Expedia Group) to discuss the challenges and successes of running a global content function within large organisations. It was fascinating to hear their stories and see how much these very different organisations have in common when it comes to the business of localisation. We frequently hear about how localisation leaders struggle to get that coveted high profile at boardroom level and it was heartening to watch the video of Expedia Group’s President and CEO, Mark Okerstrom speaking about the fundamental role of localisation in Expedia’s global success.
LocWorld ‘after hours’ also provides a wonderful opportunity to connect and share experiences with other attendees. Vistatec hosted a dinner for 30 VIP guests in the renowned Atlántico restaurant and for a few hours we mixed business with pleasure, enjoying great food and conversation on the terrace overlooking the ocean as the sun was setting.
LocWorld41 Silicon Valley in November is the next stop, and for that, we hand over the baton to our US colleagues.
Go Global, Be Global
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Aoife Murphy
Managing Director Europe, Think Global Forum
Major Accounts Director, Vistatec
This article originally appeared on Pulse. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/go-global-musings-from-locworld-portugal-2019-aoife-murphy/