EXPERIENCE

Loy Searle knows a thing or two about driving efficiency in localization work — and no wonder. She’s honed her professional philosophy over two decades of experience working with major business players on both the vendor and buyer sides of the market.

Presently the senior director of globalization and localization for a leading Enterprise Management Cloud company, Searle charted a career learning at companies like J.D. Edwards, Ventyx, Intuit, Google, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, and more. Having seen the localization process from both the perspective of the language worker and the translation commissioner, she is uniquely positioned to understand the professional process from beginning to end.

“The supplier side teaches flexibility, responsiveness, customer engagement, and heroics,” she told MultiLingual. “It’s a service industry, which means you get what you get and just do your best to deliver what is expected. It’s rare on the service side to impact an incoming process — possible but rare!”

“On the client side, the same skills are fundamentally required because most of us are services partners within our organizations,” she continued. “That said, on the client side the expectation is that we all work to improve upstream processes. We are also in the business of learning, automating, and refining our processes and usually can expect a degree of predictability. Process improvement is always preferred over heroics — that said, sometimes heroics are still required.”

And improving processes doesn’t just mean going faster — rushing is usually a recipe for mistakes, she said. Rather, the idea is to introduce flexibility into processes that allow for scaling and support quick delivery when the situation requires it.

That means eliminating unnecessary steps, setting timeboxes for subject-matter review steps, establishing the right vendor turnaround times, introducing precise delivery times for handoffs and due dates, ensuring completeness of assets, reducing file sizes when possible to enable concurrent work, and implementing process gating for immediate machine translation with prompt post-editing or a translation, editing, and proofreading solution.

“Quality is similarly nuanced,” she said. “First step is always determining what level of quality is appropriate and what the customer needs and expects. There is a spectrum, from raw MT being OK to transcreation being required. I believe the one thing that impacts quality the most is assuming ownership to support the vendors to continuously improve.”

Style guides, standards, and terminology are key for consistent results. Then there’s leveraging and managing the data. To aid that step, Searle recommends reviewing enough files, providing feedback that supplies both corrections and kudos to distinguish the quality from the shoddy, and scheduling calls with linguists and vendors to focus on continuous improvement.

“Without standards, quality is impossible,” Searle said. “Without customer ownership and engagement, vendors won’t improve. Goals and KPIs are super useful but won’t work without support. Lastly, when a vendor suggests an improvement, if possible – act on it. The vendor-client relationship is a partnership. At the source of this relationship are translations and reviewers who are learning every day what is expected – so quality takes time, focus, data, and continuity.”

Prioritized language pairs are also a decision that requires good management and a three-dimensional view of both short- and long-term business goals. According to Searle, that starts with establishing language tiers, clearly defining priorities over time and enabling budget planning.

“If tiers are not in place, good data is required for this decision, such as country revenue, addressable market (potential review per country), number of users per country/language, and finally most important – the company’s international growth strategy and timeline. It also never hurts to look at the competition,” Searle said.

“The biggest challenge is always funding – even under the best of circumstances,” she continued. “Having country revenue targets to balance against the cost is essential. When cost is factored against revenue, it’s often a no-brainer. To do this, build a partnership with the selling side of the business so that a viable business case can be created and is mutually supported. Fundamentally, sales and executive leadership need to agree market expansion is needed. Once global companies become mature, adding languages is usually a combination of business drivers and customer need measured against cost.”

Of course, on the buyer side, selecting a vendor is possibly the most important choice of all. And Searle has no shortage of experience working with and choosing the right localization partners for the right jobs. She said the most important consideration is matching the vendor size to the business.

“If your practice and language deliverables are small or just getting started, don’t go with a big vendor — they will ignore you,” Searle said. “Find a vendor who matches your size and market expectations, and work with them to mutually grow. If you are huge, don’t go with the little guys. They’ll struggle to scale, and it’s not fair to beat them up when they don’t have the capital or systems to flex at scale.”

The larger the company, the more complicated the procedures. And that’s why they often prefer to utilize requests for proposals (RFPs). To keep work manageable for herself and her team, Searle said she typically limited RFPs to three.

“The more vendors you include, the more work for you and your procurement team, and it’s not appropriate to put lots of vendors through this time-intensive costly process,” she said.

Precision and prescription are the keys to avoiding headaches, as in Searle’s experience, “everything you don’t specify will be incredibly difficult to compare.” Planning is essential, as pricing isn’t the only factor to consider. Know how you’ll compare quality samples — ideally small but useful samples — and have a clear understanding of your priorities.

“This is where your procurement relationship matters, as you will need to pick the best vendor for you, not just the cheapest vendor,” Searle said. “A cheaper vendor whose work must be corrected by another vendor will actually be more costly. Overall cost needs to be factored in.”

The throughline to all these processes is clear communication. And as Searle points out, that’s sometimes easier said than done in a profession full of independent and often introverted workers. Nevertheless, complete understanding and engagement by all stakeholders is essential to avoid oversights and incorrect assumptions.

“I think the most important lesson I’ve learned in this space is to get teams close to the internal and external customers,” Searle said. “Friction will disappear, processes will improve, quality and production teams will align, the sun will shine, and the birds will sing. It helps if teams are organized for engagement. If they aren’t, start there. Also, build the leadership relationships first and cascade these down, so the team is supported in engagement and appropriately matched with peers.”

And while a talented manager can iterate on processes all day long, it’s also important to ensure the entire team has a welcoming environment to bring out their best. As the former president of Women in Localization, Searle knows all too well how support and understanding for each team member and their unique challenges can make them feel less stressed and less alone.

“I think we are fundamentally a very diverse profession – this is one of the best things about it,” she said. “That said, in the States, we can improve on some minority representation. The perfect world would be that every profession looks as diverse as the world we live in.”

All things considered, Searle feels there’s never been a better or more exciting time to be involved in language work. With technology making the world smaller every day, even smaller companies have a shot at taking their business global. And language companies of all shapes and sizes are the key to making that international dream come true.

“For me, working with an amazing team and building an awesome practice with strong automation that will enable global growth and customer satisfaction is the stuff of dreams,” Searle said. “Nothing compares to being with a great company at that moment in time when going global really matters. When the stars align in this way, it’s a rare and awesome opportunity – it keeps me excited!”