[GALA Valencia 2024] Soapbox Paula Ferrari, Mathijs Sonnemans

1) "Strategic Planning in the Post Localization Era: Is unpredictability overrated?" - Paula Ferrari (CEO | Go Global Consulting)

In the post-localization era, we are rebranding our services, reviewing our market dominant positioning, in short, we are working towards our survival.

My vision is that there will be corpses in our industry, and there will also be great opportunities. I want to share with you some ideas based on the book by my dear professors Vassolo and Weiz: Strategy as Leadership: Facing Adaptive Challenges in Organizations.

Why do organizational strategies so frequently fail? It is not because of lack of planning. Executives usually say it is due to unpredictable changes in the competitive context — big, unforeseen events and trends. However, the professor's research concludes that unpredictability is overrated. There is one key factor that decision-makers often neglect in formulating and implementing their strategies: the crucial role and impact of loss.

If implementation is treated as a simple technical challenge, there is a high chance for the strategy to fail.

There are different types of losses in our industry, starting with the loss of identity: those who survive will no longer be translation companies.

How can we face this as an adaptive challenge and grieve what is lost in order to succeed in the post-localization era?

2) "Language Service Providers Have no Business BeingLanguage Service Providers" -  (Mathijs Sonnemans | Product Owner, Blackbird.io)

There are two problems our industry solves. How to repurpose content for different target audiences? - which is largely a linguistic problem. And how to do this efficiently. Given that (almost) all content is in some software system, the second problem is largely a technical problem.

We have about half a million amazing individual linguists and translators in the world today. They are there to solve the hardest problem using their linguistic skills. We also have about 20.000 LSPs that are largely drop shipping the content that is created by these linguists. They are only somewhat contributing to efficiency but are not at all approaching this problem technically.

For enterprise clients it is clear. We have solved the linguistic problem; the investment must go into the technical problem. We can see more and more that the technical solution providers (TMS, BMS, etc.) are starting to dictate the services that an LSP can and should provide. They are even selling to clients directly, bundling in the LSP as a secondary partner.

LSPs will have no more business selling only a ‘language solution’ but must invest in bringing technical expertise and service to the table. How? Strategy, mindset and people.

Host organization: Globalization and Localization Association