Recaps
LocWorld Kuala Lumpur takes a look at the Asian market
The Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur hosted the 39th LocWorld February 27-28, 2019, focusing on going global, often with a particularly Asian perspective.
Author Fredrik Härén gave the keynote February 27, speaking on “A rapidly changing world.” One of the best ways to respond to this rapidly changing world is to be creative. “I might write about creativity, but my passion is about how to do it on a global scale,” said Härén. He’s been traveling around the world asking himself what all the different ways of being creative entail and “what we can learn about creativity in different cultures.”
In his speaking engagements, Härén asks audiences all over the world if creativity is important in their jobs — which is universally a given; 98% of his audiences have responded in the affirmative — and if they considered themselves creative. South Korea ranked the lowest in creative confidence in the world despite being a creative country: “there is no correlation” between the perception of how creative you are and the creativity of the country you’re in. “The only thing you have to do is take things you already know and combine that with new things you’ve learned” in order to come up with an idea.
In a 9:00 am session February 27, Celina Cao of Alibaba Group covered career paths and the core skillsets to fulfill them. “Be brave,” Cao advised, and give it a try. An afternoon session looked at Netflix’s best practices to roll out localization for the Indonesian market, and Indian languages, speech translation at Alibaba and neural machine translation were also covered among other topics.
Andy Andersen and Guliano Octavianos from Tinder gave a talk the morning of Feburary 28 about localizing for Asia, keeping in mind the huge markets in the region — more people live in the city of Jakarta, for example, than in New York City. A lot of Tinder’s content “is user-driven,” said Andersen. Especially with such heavily user-driven content, the marketing and localization departments, said Octavianos, “really need to sync up and work side by side.”
The keynote panel February 28 focused on entering ASEAN markets. “We cannot see ASEAN as a whole,” but consider the different countries separately, said Ade Indarta of Netflix. “Put the money on quality,” Clare Tsai of Cloudflare noted.
