Localization

Focus
Localization for startups
Striving for efficiency
Attila Görög specializes in post-editing machine translation,
terminology, quality evaluation, standardization and the reuse of
translation material. He is currently a product manager at TAUS.
Attila Görög
Startups face different challenges than those of established companies,
at least when it comes to localization. For startups, going global
means creating content fast, in multiple languages and on a shoestring.
Startups develop incrementally and in a fast-paced manner applying an agile
approach to content creation and localization. Traditional high-level design is
replaced by frequent redesign. And if you are a localization vendor delivering
to these businesses, you need to speak agile, because when you speak agile, you
embrace efficiency. There are multiple ways to become efficient in content creation,
but how do you measure efficiency? How do you prevent glitches in your
localization process? Gathering actual hard data while your project is running is
the only practical way to move forward — and agile processes are all about collecting
and charting objective data, making it visible to the entire organization
(even to the entire supply chain) so there is never any question what the status of
a project is and what caused a certain error.
Why are startups different?
Startups explore unknown or innovative business models in order to disrupt
existing markets, while more established, larger companies borrow an existing
idea and take it to the limit to beat
competition. Steve Blank and Bob
Dorf, authors of The Startup Owner’s
Manual, add that startups are not
smaller versions of larger companies,
but instead, a startup is a temporary
organization designed to search for a
product fit and business model.
A startup essentially goes from
failure to failure in order to learn from
each failure in its search for a repeatable,
high-growth business model
based on a Big Idea. But the execution
of that Big Idea is challenging in multiple
ways. Very often, these companies
have small teams with no marketing,
human resource or sales departments
— let alone localization teams. Teams
learn by trial and error. Incremental
46 April/May 2016