Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello everyone. Melanie Francis. Hello and welcome. And Max Troyer. Hello and welcome. Thank you. Thank you both for making it. It's the first time we meet, even over a video call. Max, nice to meet you.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Great to meet you too.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: I want to make sure I give everyone an opportunity to introduce themselves. I probably cannot make honor of your experiences, so I'd rather give you that responsibility. So Max, because we haven't met before, I would love to have the honor to get to know you first. And we do Melanie and then Mila so that everyone in the audience can get a sense of who we are.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Thanks Eddie. It's really great to meet you and it's really nice to see so many people joining the stream. I am a professor of translation and localization management down in Monterey, California. I've been in the industry for, I don't know, pushing 20 years and I've held many roles in the industry. Project manager, engineer, desktop publishing, media engineering, all sorts of different things. And I'm really interested in right now I'm really interested in content. How to get content into and out of various platforms and applications and into a format that translators can actually translate.
My classes include media and audiovisual localization. I teach games localization and I have a programming for internationalization and localization course and I'm getting ready to launch this spring. So I'm an academic. Yes. But I also do consulting and help mostly small and mid sized agencies beef up their engineering departments. So anyway, I'm happy to join. Good to see everyone.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And it's great to see your range of experiences. I'm sure they are going to be really good for this conversation. Melanie, nice to see you again.
[00:01:59] Speaker C: Nice to see you again Eddie and thank you for inviting me to the very first event. A big privilege and it is a passion of mine. Of course, being a recruiter myself. It's a great topic. I'm the founder and CEO of Global Search Recruiting and Consulting. We're quite unique in the sense of we're an external agency that recruits, but also because of my background we offer a lot of complimentary consulting services.
So my background started out at a global external agency company in the UK and then moved internally to build an internal talent acquisition team. So worked for a British company and relocated my life to the US to Chicago for four years to help launch a British company in the us so got lots of relevant experience in terms of understanding how to localize recruitment globally. But also our company specializes in recruiting predominantly in the US or Assisting companies that want to expand into us. So in terms of the positions that we recruit for, we're extremely specialist recruiting only in the localization industry and mainly the more senior positions. So sales, leadership, operations.
So that's something we definitely are specialists in.
I speak fluent Welsh, so quite unique there. So even in the UK we do have a lot of localization. We're very passionate about language access ourselves in Wales. So it's just a great topic and community to be part of.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Thank you, Melanie. And we both miss the Welsh weather, of course.
[00:03:54] Speaker C: Oh yeah.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: The daily rain and darkness. That's very characteristics characteristic whales. But thank you so much, Melanie, for joining us. And we can see Mila Golovine. Thank you. So this is not going to be the same without being able to see you. Thank you so much for making an effort. Mila, tell everyone more about who you are.
[00:04:21] Speaker D: Mila Galavin. I'm founder and CEO of Masterwork Services. I've been in the language industry for over 30 years at this point. So I've seen the transition from when the Internet first came out and we started using emails and the first emails transitioned from telex and then machine translation coming out and neuroimt and kind of the exponential change in the technology. I started as a translator and then interpreter and then stayed mostly worked as an interpreter, worked as a simultaneous interpreter, consecutive interpreter and in different settings and then in every role in the business right from the first position when you are a company of one, to now. We are a strong mid tier player in the industry and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to be here.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Thank you so much. And I just want to remind everyone that we are streaming live through YouTube through a private link. So if you want someone to join, share with them the YouTube link that we have. We will have the recording of this conversation and the previous keynote available on our website, multilingual.com lang talent/. You don't need the last slash, but just in case. Right. And we will also have this conversation available on the Lang Talent podcast, which will be available, we hope very, very, very soon. But without any further ado, of course, like to ask our first question for today and it is great that you've had so much experience. Sometimes, you know, some of us who are being in the industry for a year, for two years, we lack some perspective on changes and how changes happened. And I've been in the industry now for two years, so we love to understand a little bit more about how the roles in the industry have evolved over the past few years. And I like to continue with Max and then go, Melanie and Mila, we might mix it up or we can interject each other. But I think, Max, if you can give us your perspective on that, how have the roles in the industry evolved in the past few years from your perspective?
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we've seen kind of a sea change in where talent is coming from. I think if you look 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you had basically translators and interpreters who were evolving in their careers and started to know more and start helping their colleagues and then eventually started managing teams and managing their colleagues. And those are the people who went on to create many of the agencies that now hire tons of translators and interpreters today.
But what IBM did some research. I think we were all aware of this research that IBM did a long time ago, that if you have someone who is good at a skill, when you elevate them to a manager, that doesn't necessarily make them a good manager. It's not. The skills don't translate. So it's better to just take random people and assign them to manager roles, and they tend to do better. About criticizing all these TNI graduate TNI folks who have created localization or translation agencies, but now we have people, specialists who are going into, into the industry, coming into the industry from elsewhere, like you yourself, Eddie, coming into the industry with new ideas and, and really innovating in ways no one has said AI yet in this panel presentation. So I'm going to go ahead and say we're all, we're all dealing with how AI is changing things. But basically, as Mila said, we've seen a lot of changes in this industry.
We've seen it all, in fact, and that's my main point, I guess, is that we've seen a shift in who is kind of involved in localization, and we've been through technology changes as well.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: Melanie, thank you.
Okay, so in terms of roles, as I mentioned in my intro, I focus more on the sales leadership operations, not so much the linguists. So in terms of sales, something that has been huge is really the skills of, you know, technology.
So a couple of years ago, I know when I was getting pitched by kind of CRM companies in terms of recruitment, I'd ask a technology question and consistently the salesperson would say, oh, I'm going to have to bring in my, you know, technology expert to answer that question. And it's kind of like, well, what were we doing in this meeting then? Because, you know, I want to know the tech. So now, as you mentioned, you Know, the AI is really the big thing, the big topic. That's one of the key questions, you know, clients are asking, especially in this industry. So in terms of the feedback I've had from LSP owners now, when they're looking to hire sales candidates, ideally solutions architects, solutions engineers who have that kind of sales ability are more becoming the ideal candidates.
So, you know, that's something in terms of sales that we're seeing, but also sales candidates that can adapt quickly to technology, but also have a passion and are curious.
So in terms of marketing, something we've seen is more kind of data automation, obviously, kind of anything that's kind of AI integrations, tools. There's just so many data analysis.
Personally, I can also kind of attest as a business owner that data has never been more relevant. So when we're talking to a highly specialized candidate, coding that candidate correctly so our AI tools can very efficiently kind of read that data within a few seconds and find that ideal candidate. And of course, linguists, you know, in terms of quality assurance, that desktop publishing, they're the kind of new positions. But essentially, all I'm really saying is any position, you know, you need that kind of tech skill there.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: And thank you, thank you. That's really great to hear. And we will probably talk more about that as the conversation goes along. Mila, you of course, have a huge experience hiring yourself. Can you tell us what you've seen?
[00:11:19] Speaker D: Well, I'm going to be building up to what Melanie and Troy said. And so I think one of the most important skills, a few, I mean, a couple decades ago and, you know, last. Last decade, one of the important things was what, you know, I think the most critical thing and the most critical skill today is how fast can you learn.
Because today it doesn't matter how much you know today, because by the end of the day, technology and things have already changed. And so how quickly can you learn and then how quickly can you adapt? And so ability to adapt to change, ability to integrate change in a way. Ability to handle stress because change creates stress. And we all, that's why we all kind of a lot of people are so nervous, what's going to happen tomorrow? How am I going to handle tomorrow? So ability to handle stress, ability to integrate change, ability, ability to learn fast and flexibility.
So what one of my mentors told me was one of the most essential business skills was ready, fire, aim, as opposed to ready, aim, fire. Because by the time you're done aiming, it's changed.
That has become critically important today.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Thank you, Mila. For putting in that perspective. And of course, we will be talking throughout this conversation about what are some of those skills that, you know, stand the proof of time to put it, to put it that way. But while we get there, I think a big element of perspective is understanding whether for those of us who are new. Right. For me, the AI wave in the language industry, it's new is. I wouldn't say it's a black swan for me, but it's definitely like a significant change. It's like all of a sudden this thing, I mean, I thought like we were on it, but apparently like it does, it did made an impact. It didn't destroy anything. It just kind of like transformed things around, kind of like how things happen in the universe sometimes.
Max, you've seen some of these technologies, you know, come and stay, some come and go.
Is this AI wave any different from what you've seen or how is it different from what you've seen?
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Well, we've seen it all before, I think in this industry, and I do think I'm going to start with AI, I think is a little bit different.
But with neural machine translation and automation, we've basically seen that we can do more with less resources, less people resources.
To some degree, neural machine translation allowed a translator to go from 2,000 words a day to maybe 5,000 words a day and just amazing scale in what they were able to accomplish in a single day.
From a project management point of view, when you are trying to manage all these translation and localization projects, back when I started it was email and Excel spreadsheets to manage project flow and track where everything is. But now if you're not using a translation management system to see where your projects are and manage translation memories, I don't know, some people on this stream might remember a translation kit where we literally created a zip file that had the translation memory, the files for translation, the reference files and that would go to the translator. But the first wave was really automation that did not require any artificial intelligence. Just through fancy, well written algorithms. We can automate a lot of what we do in the industry and stop being glorified file pushers and sit back and not quite relax because things go wrong a lot. But AI I think is a little bit different in the sense that it can start kind of thinking like a project manager and prioritize and route strings from another AI to a different AI and even to a human, if none of the AIs can figure things out. So I do think that we are going to see a slight downturn in how many people are needed and that those people that remain are going to need the analytical skills, the creative thinking, the resilience, flexibility and agility that will let them figure out how we're going to automate and use this AI to our advantage.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you, Max. And I think, Melanie, you've probably seen this also from the sales and kind of like growth ecosystem, right? People in marketing, people in growth, people in customer success. It's almost like you probably need to have some knowledge of this information. This was mainly happening. What are your clients asking for? I guess in this wave of AI, which is the conversation, I mean, the.
[00:16:35] Speaker C: Best candidates at the moment are the ones that are proactively putting themselves on courses outside their own company so that they can bring more information into the company. So a couple of great sales candidates I've been speaking to recently, I don't even have to ask them about AI. They're already telling me, right. So what I do as part of my role is I take the initiative to spend maybe an hour a week looking into AI tools that can make our sales department more efficient. And then I bring that business case to the CEO, the leadership team.
And you know something, that from working in the US and working in the uk, one of the culture differences has been that the US have always been quite passionate about self improvement and that kind of continuous learning. Whereas in the UK we tend to think it's the employer's duty to put us on training and all the government is going to pay for it, but now that's just not good enough.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: So.
[00:17:44] Speaker C: So I can't comment on Europe or anywhere else, but that's definitely something that I would encourage anyone in any position go and find the information. Because AI is evolving so many new tools. But the problem is there's so much noise, you can get a bit lost in all these different AI tools. I know I kind of started getting a bit lost with everything last year and I was thinking, you know what? Need to focus on what we're good at as humans and experts. Not kind of turning too robotic and relying too much on that. So what I would say I attended when I went to Lock World a Talk Global Sake Talk in San Francisco, Gabriel Fairman, the CEO of Burroworks, was showcasing how he was using AI to actually make linguists more creative. So if these linguists are now, you know, automating and being as productive, you know, using AI to their benefit, they then have more time to be creative. So that I would say is something super positive that I got out of that.
So, yeah, and what I will say is, again, my experience of living and working in the US versus, you know, the UK, I always found that the US was about five years ahead of the UK and we're pretty developed. So in. I remember in 2019, when I was presenting to the board where I was head of global talent, about, you know, how are we going to hit our headcount next year, I kind of said, you know what? Instead of just investing 100k in one more recruiter that has the productivity of my maybe hiring 10 people a month, why don't we first look at what AI tools there are now? There wasn't as many as now, but there was already automation back five years ago that we're only talking about in the UK now. In the recruitment industry, there was chat bots that could kind of talk to candidates. But something that I don't know if this happens now too much is AI is kind of being used and tagged on to all these kind of not very complex tools. So I actually got pitched by a company in recruitment and they were like, you know, we're AI, and I just said to the salesperson, okay, tell me what is the artificial intelligence and what you're trying to sell me? And literally he said, oh, I'm. I'm gonna have to ask my tech guy. And I'm thinking, so this isn't an AI solution, it's just an automated tool. So I think it's really important for us not to get Ms. Sold by, you know, that the word AI and really kind of ask and really put the pressure on someone. Okay, so what exactly is this complex AI solution? And you know, a lot of the time then you can kind of quickly pick out from the noise which tool you want to use.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: That's very interesting to have this wave be one of those waves where everyone is like, let's dig into it, but let's be careful.
Which is a really, really interesting development. Mila, from your perspective, what. What have. Do you. Do you see this as very different, similar, or how do you see it?
[00:21:09] Speaker D: Well, it is different, right? It is different, but it is similar to when computers came on. So it changed everything. So AI is changing everything. And from that perspective, however, people who. It's not going to replace people, right? The same way as computers didn't. People who know how to use computers replaced in the workforce, people who don't. And the same thing, people who are fluent with AI will replace people who will be able to advance faster and better than people who don't. But Max talked about project management skills and Melanie talked about sales. And I want to go and talk about the translator and the interpreter. And I think what is going to be critically important right now are the core skills that we have in kind of in a chaos and in a massive change. We want to return back to basics and our core skills are more important than ever. First of all, I believe that our industry is going to explode exponentially because the amount of content that we translate today is very minimal compared to the amount of content that's being produced. The amount of human communication happening today and compared to what's being interpreted is also very small. So we're actually going to see an exponential expansion and growth in our industry through quote unquote democratization and access. And the boring things like, I don't know, translating the spec sheet for a packing list, those are going to go away. But the more creative, when you're looking at where's the mistake? Where is the misunderstanding? How can you see a better, how can you train an engine? How can you make this communication even better than it is? That is going to be what's more essential. So kind of like making our job more fun. So maintaining core skills, really learning and practicing those hybrid scenarios when it, how can AI assist you live when you're interpreting? How can you use those glossaries, how can you use those note taking skills from AI as opposed to, you know, having to shorthand on paper and then developing critical thinking. Right. Critical thinking in terms of it is much more difficult to notice mistake in a fluid text.
It is if you are not really a subject matter expert and somebody starts telling you and with great elaborative, fluid, you know, fluency and using even potential technical terms, something you cannot tell the difference.
But mistakes are critical. A very simple sentence, execute not pardon. The power of a comma execute comma pardon versus execute not comma pardon is a difference between a life sentence and a death sentence. So for us, being able to pick up the slightest nuance in where we are going to naturally tend to go, okay, it sounds fluid. Kind of like disengage, that is going to be one of the most critical things. And the role of a human is even much more important.
So maintaining core skills, practicing those hybrid scenarios, developing that critical thinking and staying on point. And I want to build up on this previous presentation. If you do what you love, you never work a day in your life, pick what you love. So when you pick doing what you love, you don't see challenges as on the way you see challenges as not challenges as in the way, like something preventing you. You see challenges as on the way you experience what's called eustress. So keeping up and making sure you're really specializing in what you love. So you are looking at even more and more challenging opportunities.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And it's like looking at the wave as devastation or a wave to ride. So this is really interesting how this, of course, permeates to other. It is not only particular to translators and interpreters, but have we seen sales, marketing engineers? And like, everyone needs to be open to these things. And I have to agree with you from what I do, I cannot make a good writer. With AI, you're either a good writer or you're not a good writer. And if I ask you to use AI or if you decide to use AI, that criteria as a writer of what, like, sounds AI ish. It's very impressive how, for example, our growth team, the team in charge of marketing, can really see when something is created by AI versus when someone actually took the effort to generate this message that's compelling, that it's like it's only human can add. Like what you're mentioning, Mila. This, like, nuance. So independent of which, like part, which profession you are on, these are like really, really key components in what you've seen for translators, interpreters, engineers, designers, anyone in our industry and other industries with this whole AI wave. And you've been giving us some recommendations already, but why would you. What would be your recommendations to them? If you. If you would have to like, list them per se, or just give them one recommendation, Whatever you choose to do, Max. And then we'll do Melanie and Mila.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Again, sorry, can you clarify the question? Recommendations for someone entering the career, recommendations.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: For someone in the industry, a professional in the industry, whether, you know, what are. What are some of those.
And we're getting into the timeless skills here that we think they should keep in mind. But what are some of those recommendations to them today?
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I guess if reframing the question, like how to. How to stay employed and not get laid off in one of these awful waves, I don't know, it's.
I mean, I'm finding out, like, people that have been pivotal in companies aren't safe. I don't want to be doom right now, but I think if. If I were. If I were trying to stay in this industry, I would try to keep my curiosity alive.
I would try to network as much as possible, try to connect with all. All verticals within a company, try to try to make myself indispensable through just being the friendly person that people talk to.
I think part of that is being motivated and being self aware of what's going on.
One of the things that I learned about, we have some graduates at Netflix and I learned about this concept, searching for dissent, where if someone comes up with an idea at Netflix, they're supposed to go around and talk to as many people as they can about that idea and try to search for people who can kind of shoot it down or poke holes in it. The idea is to make that concept stronger. So I think that resiliency, having empathy, when people are bringing you their concepts and you have to say, oh, if we've done that, I'm thinking of Renato Venonato in the industry. If you've ever seen him present or you've seen him raise his hand at a conference and he's like, oh, five years ago company X did that and 10 years ago company Y did that. So how is that different today anyway? I think, yeah, it's just try to maintain curiosity, but also obviously building your technology skills, updating your technology skills, learning what AI can and cannot do, trying out different AI engines, see what they can do. I thought it was interesting. There are some people in the chat who said that they're under NDA and can't use AI. And I've heard from multiple translation agency owners that one of their, one of the things that keeps them up at night is translators who are told not to use AI, but then do. And how do you, how do you, how do you work around that? Anyway, so, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a crazy time in our industry. But, you know, we are, we are rising to the occasion.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: That's definitely, that's definitely true, Max. Melanie, how do you see this? What would you recommend?
[00:29:41] Speaker C: Well, there's lots of different kind of ways we can kind of answer that. But to Max's point, the first thing I was going to talk about was cure curiosity. So that's something my clients look for. That's the trait.
So especially sales recruitment. It's not an exact science. You know, a resume doesn't. It only tells so much. It's the person, the traits are curiosity. So I had a client that was looking for a director of production and they had just transitioned to Plunat. Obviously there are other TMS companies out there, but the most important quality and trait they were looking for was someone that was curious because they didn't know how to use Blue Net. So they needed this person to be poking around and seeing how this TMS could be tailored to maximize their kind of company goals. So. So that's something that's really important, which we've touched on, embracing AI. So, you know, it's no secret that some jobs are, you know, people are going to get laid off due to AI. So it's getting ahead of that and seeing, you know, how can you reposition yourself and adapt where you're using AI to your advantage.
And like I touched on, if you're in sales, maybe looking at that kind of solutions, architect route or marketing.
And it was quite interesting. I was on a lock walk in Monterey as part of lockworld, and one of my candidates I'd known who was very happy in their position, but she said to me, Melanie abd. I was like, what does ABD mean? She said, always be developing. So, you know, in whether that's looking for an X opportunity outside the industry, not necessarily to move, but just to kind of see what's out there and keep current, but all looking at the next opportunity within your organization. So how do I develop so that I can get a new opportunity, maybe a leadership role or segue into a different, you know, department?
So, yeah, that's kind of some recommendations. And you know, there was a quote that I kind of picked up, a general quote this week which kind of resonated. I'm a new mum as well, so. Resonated with again, navigating the challenge of motherhood as well, you know, just really to what Mila said. So there's not, there's. There's really not a difficult thing unless you decide it's difficult. Otherwise, it's just the next thing you're figuring out. So just something positive. It is that mindset.
And that would be my recommendation.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Mila. You've already given us a bunch of recommendations today.
[00:32:44] Speaker D: Well, going from a position of a company right where you're looking, what, having seen what people really succeed and what people don't succeed.
And I think the most important thing is loving what you do. Because when you love what you do, then you are automatically driven to be the best at it. And when a person is the best, when you are competing with yourself every day for being the best you can be, then you're also authentic. When you're authentic, it shows, it shines. You know, some people for whom this is not a job, when you do what you love, it is not a work life balance because you never stop.
You're wanting to do more, you're wanting to learn More so people for whom it's a drive, people for whom it's a life mission and goal. And for me it is. Has been always versus people for whom it's a job.
The person for whom it's a job, the person who is coming in, clocking in, clocking out, is probably not in the right place. And it's probably the person who's going to be the first to go as opposed to. And I'm not saying you need to work 80 hours a week, right? There are some people who are incredibly efficient and they work 8 to 5, and in that 8 to 5, they accomplish and change the world. Right? And there are people who come in and maybe work the same amount of hours and it's a job. And nothing gets done. Right. Or you don't feel like they're really progressing or learning. So questioning, going back deep inside and going, am I doing what I love? And there is different management theories. Some EOS theory says right person, right seat. You have seen aligning the person. I think it's Drucker, aligning the person to their strength.
Dr. John Demartini talks about aligning people to their highest values. So there are different theories behind it, but the deepest one is, are you doing what you love?
And then you have absolute job security if you do. And I'm sorry, I'm going to finish with a quote that I love from actually Dr. John Demartini. And he says wisdom is the instantaneous recognition that every crisis is a blessing.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Every crisis is a blessing. Thank you so much, everyone. I wanna ask those that are still in the stream on YouTube, those that have arrived specifically for this panel to start putting your questions there. We've seen, of course, some comments about whether or not to use artificial intelligence, people using NDA, and kind of like opinions on that. We still have a few more questions. We are in the panel Essential Skills for language professionals in 2025. But as those that have been here have seen, this applies to not only language professionals, but professionals in many other industries. But for language professionals in particular, this is super insightful. There is one concept that I recommend we think about for those that work remotely. I remember when you started working remotely, we talked a lot about work life balance. And then one of the leaders that I worked with, he worked with the concept of work life integration, meaning work is part of who you are and part of your life. And how do you integrate that? And how does. In a way, what you do accommodates to the way in which you live. And it's the same for A lot of people be like, oh, that's the same thing. That's what I mean about, like, work life balance. But sometimes when you say balance, it's almost like you are putting. They're like contrasting positions or focuses. Rather, it is the same. It's part of, like, the same construct. And then when you say work life integration, then your brain tends to think about it a bit, a bit differently. And I would agree with Mila, if you love what you do, it's it. You almost have to really make sure we have things like time boxing, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to do a lot of other things, like have lunch, because you're so into what you do and you get inflow that you really forget to have lunch. Not because you are an unhealthy person who doesn't want to eat. He's like, no, you're just so excited about things. You just keep going. So habit makes a huge difference. We'll probably talk about more. We'll probably talk more about this tomorrow on the second panel, but I personally recommend that you have a structure if you love working remotely. Because part of my work life integration is that remote work is amazing. It allows me to live in my hometown in Colombia, in a city that most people wouldn't know. My wife is from the same hometown. So remote work in itself, it's kind of like, enables and empowers me. So what allows me to do this is to be able to do things like time boxing, having the greatest Internet. So I'd really recommend, if you want to be in an industry like the language industry, you really need to have, like the best setup, tech setup. I mean, a good screen and a good camera. It seems obvious, but you will be very surprised. Kind of like how surprised I am to have people that are not able to communicate with teams across different geographies because they just don't have good Internet and they could be amazing professionals. So I really recommend the basics, that the basics are covered, especially with remote work in our industry. But please start adding your questions in the form of a question so that I can read them whenever we get them, but as a type of summary. Max, Melanie, and Mila, and you've mentioned some of these. There are some skills that are applicable to not only our industry, but many other industries. What do you think from your own experience as professionals and leaders, what do you think are timeless skills? Skills that were amazing to have 20 years ago, amazing to have today, and will continue to be amazing. And I know you've mentioned curiosity, so if you want to spend more on that. You know, what has that done for you? That's amazing. I personally call curiosity optimizing for serendipity, which to me, really, what it means is I just. I just put myself in the places that I find things could happen. And that's usually, like, my gut feeling being like, I really should go to ata65, or I should really go to, like, this other event, or I should really talk to this person. And that usually something amazing happens out of that. But it's not that I thought, huh, when I meet with this person, this is what's gonna happen. It's like, no, you can't tell. But what you can do is have that level of kind of, like, curiosity. And I would agree with Mila that it only. It's much better to make it than fake it. In this case, you can fake curiosity, but it's so tiring. It's very tiring to fake curiosity. But, Max, I know we've talked about this skills. If there's anything you would like to add, it'd be great.
[00:39:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, first of all, there are a lot of good training opportunities out there, and I think that one of the most valuable aspects of those training opportunities are the networking aspect.
And I think that is also a skill that I think everyone can kind of cultivate and work at.
When you go to these conferences, lok world, the global sake ata, how good are you at connecting with people? And I think one of the coolest things is when you don't network for yourself, but you network for others, where you meet someone, and then later in the conference, you meet someone, and you're like, oh, have you talked to that person? I talked to them earlier. You should definitely connect with them, and you make introductions, make connections. That makes you someone who makes connections, and that's a really useful thing.
I also think that a skill that you can use or apply is mentoring. And if you've been in the industry for a long time, try to find one of the organizations, Women in localization, I think. Well, the Middlebury Institute has. We have. Our department has a mentoring program, the TLM mentorship program. There are many ways that you can mentor and get involved and help out people that are joining the industry, young people joining the industry, welcome them into the industry. And also we have pairings of, like, really senior people who want to. Or, like, new managers who want to be paired with a very senior manager. And so I think those two things, networking and mentoring, are things that aren't, like, in a traditional skills list, but Those might be the things that help you take your career to the next level.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: I think I would have to agree, Max. And if anyone sees kind of like the famous, like, pyramid of learning, like when you learn the most is when you teach others.
So mentoring really gives you the opportunity to kind of like introspect and kind of like teach others about some of the things. Not necessarily teach teach, but, you know, as you've seen others develop, you start seeing what are the places to kind of like give guidance. And that feels a lot like teaching. So thank you, Max, for sharing that. Melanie?
[00:41:56] Speaker C: Yeah, just kind of this, I think this is a great kind of panel because we're all adding different perspectives, but kind of on the same page as well. So just to your point, Max, networking, especially when you're working remote, you do really have to make a conscious effort to get out there, get on a plane, make provisions, you know, with, with your family so that you can kind of go away for a week. You know, it's not kind of. You do have to kind of be a bit globe, more global with your mindset there. And if you can do that, that is kind of just a game changer. What I will say also about networking, personally, I come back re energized because, you know, when you're working remote, you are a bit in your bubble. You're losing that kind of collaboration, kind of synergy around with your colleagues and, and you know, there's nothing better than getting your team in a room and just kind of bouncing ideas off each other. So, yeah, definitely say networking. I mean, we're really lucky in the local community that we love knowledge sharing.
It's kind of that industry where we're curious about people, language, travel. So it's just great. And also in the local community, just all the social events that kind of pre kind of warm up where you kind of networking in a more relaxed setting, because not everyone has those skills or want to be in a room and start just striking up conversations with strangers and all that. So I think the networking events in the industry are just great. So that's definitely something I agree with because a timeless skill is interpersonal skills. So, you know, in terms of building relationships, as you said, Max, if you're mentoring someone else in your team, but also if you're new to the industry, asking questions, because you might start in one position, but if you're networking with people in other departments and, you know, tell me a bit more about what you do, and maybe then you might, through your interpersonal skills, find that you're better suited to a different department in the. In the industry.
And, you know, something that I will say is there's some research being done that kind of 30, you know, they call it like the silent generation. You know, the kind of people like our parents that, you know, back in the day, they maybe needed to hone in on one skill and that could last them, you know, 30 years in a career, and now it's kind of every two years, like maybe even one year with AI. What. What are your new skills that you're learning? You have to keep reskilling now. And that's fun, as long as that's something that you're curious about and obviously loving your job.
So, yeah, that's. That's kind of, for me, kind of tying everything up. And I know there are a couple of questions in the chat. There is one that's been addressed to me, so I'm not sure. Mila, you want.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Yeah, let's. Let's get. Let's get Mila to give us a bit of her insights, and then we'll get onto the questions. I've seen some of this as well. Thank you so much for the questions, everyone. Keep them coming. And as some of you have asked, we will have this conversation on the website multilingual.com lang-talent.com sorry, that's-talent slash. And that's it. Mila, before we go on to the questions, tell us a little bit about those skills that you see that are timeless, that are good forever.
[00:45:39] Speaker D: So the timeless skill. And I'm actually, I want to make one comment because I see a lot of comments in the question, AI about looking at other jobs, how to change, you know, do we leave the industry? Do we stay in the industry? Is there something left for us in our industry? And those questions are not even come. Not just coming in this chat. Those questions are everywhere. AI is affecting every single industry. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, movie producers, truck drivers. There is not an industry or a space that is not affected by AI today. So it's affecting humanity in general. And that's an amazing thing because that will allow us to grow, to grow and evolve. So there is no quote, unquote, escape from this wave. You either learn how to ride it or you drown in it. And I think the timeless skill is communication.
And actually, I want to focus on three timeless skills. One is ability to communicate with others.
Another skill that is critically important is being able to integrate stress and staying connected to self in a moment of the highest stress. Because we are biologically wired. When Change happens. That is actually one of the factors that activates stress. We like things being the same and so ability to integrate stress and managing it.
And then the last skill is making sure that.
How do you make sure that you are actually aligned with yourself? Right. Aligned with. Again, I keep repeating that it seems like, but you can say it another way. So building the adaptability through practice, critical thinking and maintaining and building up on your core skills.
[00:47:44] Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you so much. And for those of you that are listening, remember this conversation will be available multilingual.com lang talent and it will also be available on YouTube and on our podcast Lang Talent on Spotify. You will receive an email with the learnings from these sessions and hopefully we will have Melanie, Mila and Max again with us in the future. We should have written Mila and Salute Mila so that everyone would have their name starting with an M. Just putting that out there.
We do have one question, we have several questions, but I'm going to start with one that is pretty interesting. This one is going to be for Mila and then I'll ask the one for Melanie. It says Casey says a lot of translators fear they are slowly being made into AI. Post editors agree, disagree. If you disagree, can you give specific counterexamples? Sounds like a quiz in a class actually.
[00:48:50] Speaker D: Well, I think it'll be both. Yes, we are post editing AI, but it's all a matter of perspective. Are we really post editing AI or are we critically thinking through the context that is there in AI? Are we looking for that one comma that is a difference between life sentence and death sentence? And so the ability to really in that moment to step back and chunk things up and look at it and going for what purpose am I doing this? Who is on the other side of it? And if we do that, then this editing process, this post editing process is really takes a different meaning, right? And then there is a whole part of content that AI really cannot handle.
AI can make suggestions. And I frequently, for example, look at what make suggestions for and it's a creative process. And I'll look at the five different things AI suggested. And I'll take a word from here, word from here, a little bit of an idea from here and I'll make my own thing. But that process now is a lot faster. Right? So I guess that's my response.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: It's both, but it's probably thank you, Mila. That's a high level answer. Thank you so much. And Melanie, I love the next question because from the perspective of someone who is looking at the industry as I looked into the industry two years ago. Right. Like, do you think the language services industry is an attractive sector for sales and marketing professionals? Does the intangibility of the product or products or services, I guess intense industry competition and AI threat put people off?
How do you see the industry?
[00:50:36] Speaker C: Well, I'm obviously biased because I'm passionate about the industry, but so to kind of remove the bias, let's look at some data.
The reason why I set up my company during COVID was because the industry was still growing. Okay. Not by as much as it was year previous and that's fantastic.
So it's something, I mean language is something that, you know, if you're passionate about that, then you know, it's something that you're going to enjoy selling if you're curious about culture and all that kind of thing. Or maybe you've got like some of my candidates some experience. Maybe a family member or a friend is deaf, you know, or you work in a kindergarten. And I was quite impressed when I was looking a few how? Well, in the UK it's BSL as opposed to ASL is actually taught to kindergarten children. So it's definitely not something that's going away.
And also there's really not many candidates looking to leave.
A lot of our sales and marketing candidates are maybe wanting to join a language technology company instead of a language services company or they want to stay in language services, but they're looking for a company that's really embraced technology. So one of the questions they ask me before I want to I put them forward is what's the company tech stack, you know, what are they doing to invest in technology? What are the AI tools I'm going to get given to be equipped to focus on selling? You know, if I'm just going to be sending out emails manually, I'm not interested in working for this company.
So yeah, not hardly anyone leaving the, leaving the industry from our perspective. And also, you know, to answer the second part of Michael's question is, you know, would people looking to leave because of intense industry competition. Well, you shouldn't be in sales if that is putting you off.
That should be something that excites you, fires you up and you always navigate. You know something I learned when I was working in America, one of my American recruiters who was amazing was saying that when you see a mountain, you, you find a way to either go over, go around, go under. And that is the mentality of a, any good employee, not just in sales.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: Thank you Melanie and Mila Max, there is a question from 03555 and I'm putting it on you because of your reaction to the companies that are not allowed, that are having people sign NDAs so that they don't use artificial intelligence. And this is not unique to hires, right? We have. I have an entire interview from someone with Mugais from memoq. He's the head of sales of Memoq and he's saying he's got clients, companies that want to hire them for their language services that say we don't want. You tell us what others are doing in terms of AI. We don't want to use it, but just tell us what they are using and don't use it on us, please.
There are some privacy concerns, but my question really is about companies and people that are refusing to integrate AI in their workflows or working with it. Is there a future for them in the language industry or they're going to have a slow death?
[00:54:15] Speaker B: No, I think there are definitely companies and individuals who are not using AI and that is, that is totally fine. I've gotten into a couple arguments with mainly TMS managed directors at TMS companies. I have, my personal theory is that when you're doing trans creation or marketing translation that when you show a translator a machine translation suggestion, you are polluting what the brilliant solution that they might come up with. And people vehemently disagree with me on that and say that you inspire translators with mt. But I personally feel that and even neural machine translation, if you're doing like marketing or transcreation and you want an original translation, that is the best it can be that by showing MT you are potentially shooting yourself in the foot. I also want to mention the founder of we are very Ronaldo de Zigre. I don't know how to say his last name. I was talking to him the other day at slatercon and he told me that when he hires translators they come to him and say, okay, I'll take your translation test. I want to translate for we are very. And he says, okay, write 500 words about anything you want. And that's how he evaluates a translator's skills. If they, well, that's one of the ways they evaluate the translator skills. If they can't write 500 words from scratch and it be a compelling piece of content, then how, how could they possibly be good translators? And I, and I love that. And we're actually seeing that kind of manifest itself in people that don't even speak another language or are starting to get involved in the localization industry, because they are. They are the referees for the AIs. When the AI is confused, it will reach out to a subject matter expert who doesn't speak the source language. And that subject matter expert will be asked, what, can you explain this. This sentence and make it make sense regardless of what the source said? So I've kind of crossed the line back into AI, but definitely my wife is a translator. She translates for the cosmetics industry in France. And the cookbook. She does a lot of cookbooks. No AI in use there. And I think purposely not wanting to be influenced by AI or even machine translation to some degree. So. Yeah, yeah.
[00:56:27] Speaker A: And that's incredible. You know, we've gotten some companies come to us and say, hey, multilingual, you know, we like to translate your magazine. And he's like, it's going to be pretty difficult to translate some of these articles. Right? It's not. It's not a direct translation. Mila, you have something to say?
[00:56:42] Speaker D: I want to make a comment. So I agree with Max, and actually, a lot about translation happens without AI. There's not just the creativity component. Human creativity is better. There's also the huge cybersecurity risk component. And we work in a lot of regulated industries, and the cybersecurity is a huge concern. So.
However, there are AI tools that we can use other in other parts of the process, and so we can not be separated from this AI revolution. Right. So just not the translation process can potentially be completely without AI, but it doesn't mean that, I don't know, invoice processing or some other part of the workflow is not automated and improved.
[00:57:37] Speaker A: Thank you. And we have three minutes on our scheduled time. This time we did much better. The last one.
Do we have any final thoughts, Max? Melanie, Mila, from. I'm seeing a few other questions, and mostly this idea of, like, really, is it fine to not use AI? I thought we were going to be forced to use AI. I don't think anybody's forced to do anything.
But, you know, if you deny yourself certain opportunities to, you know, optimize certain places of the work that you do, I don't think you'll be thinking, like, what did you say it was? Abd always developing. It doesn't really seem like a developing mindset or a growing mindset. Any final thoughts, Mila? Melanie, Max, before we go, I mean.
[00:58:27] Speaker C: AI is definitely part of. Even outside this industry. On a personal level. I use it. You know, if. I don't know, I needed to draw up a legal document, and I just typed into AI, you know, write me a legal document for this, read it, and then that. I see that as a suggestion and then I can tweak it and put my personal touch on there. Or if I'm trying to write a complex email to a client and I really don't have all this time to analyze everything and think, I will write the email myself. And then, because I'm not a writer set, you know, just say to ChatGPT, proofread this email. And with the word proofread, it's not going to give me any new ideas because I want. It's from me. The client's asking me my opinion, you know, for hiring people internally in a different country.
Write me an employment contract in, you know, what are the things I need to consider, you know, observing holidays in this country. I mean, it's. It's just for me, super useful. But again, I'm using it more on a retail level to maybe save me 30 minutes. But kind of embedding it into a business process is really where you get the value add.
[00:59:53] Speaker A: Mila.
[00:59:54] Speaker B: Max, I just want to not let us lose sight of the forest. I mean, the language services industry's goal is to build bridges to help cultures communicate. And I think whatever we do, whatever technology we use, we need to evaluate it and decide if it helps us further that mission.
One of the things that I've been interested in is how localization departments within, like a buyer on the client side can be considered profit centers instead of like service providers that are drains on the company's bottom line. And so elevating the localization industry, elevating those localization departments, reminding every, everyone that not only are we building bridges of communication, we are leading to global growth for many of these companies, and we are responsible for adding to the bottom line and overall profitability of these countries. So we should be proud of that and celebrate that.
[01:00:55] Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely. Max. I really love that idea. And we shouldn't lose sight of that. Mila, any final thoughts?
[01:01:04] Speaker D: I want to talk about an elephant in the room.
There is 3 billion people who do not have connect, you know, are behind the digital divide. They either have don't have digital connection, or they're 40% of the world don't have access, access to education and the language that they understand. And there is a whole. So that's a whole one third of us who are behind this completely, this technology revolution. And we can actually, through the innovation that we have created in our industry today, we can leapfrog the marginalized languages and help progress and help advance them. So think about how what you learned today, how the new tools, the new technology, how can we help? Maybe other languages that are there in your country and that also opens new markets and provides additional roi.
[01:01:59] Speaker A: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Melanie Francis from Global Search, Mila Golovine from Master We're a Max Troyer from Middleburg Institute for doing this. I've really enjoyed our conversation and I think it's been super insightful. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[01:02:14] Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
[01:02:19] Speaker A: Thank you, thank you, thank you. And everyone who has joined us live on YouTube. Thank you so much for being part of Language Talent or Lang Talent 2024 today. Tomorrow we have two more sessions similar to how we did it today. We will have we'll first have a keynote on 10 AI powered language tools for translators and interpreters for 2025 with Laszlo Barga. This is going to be at 6am Los Angeles Pacific Time, 11am Buenos Aires and Berlin, 3pm in the afternoon we will also have after this we will have a panel on fostering well being in remote work. We will have Sophie Solomon, Nicole Spy James, Liam Martin and Eva Claudine Kova.
Without any more comments on this, thank you so much for your participation today and we hope to see you tomorrow.
