Challenges vs Benefits! General Manager – Saudisoft Co. Ltd. Adding a New Language? Challenges vs Benefits! By: Wafaa Mohiy General Manager – Saudisoft Co. Ltd.

The Story Introduction Rising Actions Climax Resolution The End! The idea behind the session is to share the experience that we went through for supporting languages other than our core competency language. Will go through how we started, obstacles, challenges and how did we manage to run concurrent projects for more than 20 languages at the same time.

Introduction … Industry Snapshot - GALA! Total GALA LSP members: 338 SLV GALA members: 61 “A dozen member companies are self-identified as “RLVs” – reaching just beyond a single language, sometimes to two or three.” Laura Brandon, Executive Director Globalization and Localization Association

Introduction … The story begins with a simple question! Can you support other languages? Do you have resources who can translate into “Chadian Arabic”?! What about Chadian French!! What about other Arabic Script Languages you can offer?!! Would it be a problem to allocate resources for rare language like “Ewe”? It always start by existing or even potential client asking this unexpected question. From our comfort zone, we usually expected a question about the Arabic variation like what is the difference between Arabic SA and Arabic EG? But asking about Kurdish, Farsi as other Arabic script language or even African the typical answer was usually No!.

The Rising Actions… Repeated Questions! Different Clients!! Same fear - Failing! “No” did not seem to be wise answer! As the question gets repeated, some internal questions were raised with major client asking for 11 languages. Why not? Adding a new language was scary because simply we did not know what it takes or even if we should. We have strong experience in handling one language, would it be the same? What if we failed! How this will affect our relationship with our clients and our capabilities. Loosing business VS What it takes to successes.

Climax … Regional Does not mean comfort zone! Language Knowledge Is it same experience?! Tools? We have decided to list all the fears/unknowns. New language is a new language. Even if it was spoken in your region, e.g. Kurdish. It is spoken in different regions and there are two scripts for the same language. Some languages you might now even know they exist; e.g., or you never met a person who really speaks the language. Thus Language knowledge is important. We have strong experience in handling one language, would it be the same? Should we add more skills to our skillset? Tools, do they support these languages?

Climax … Side effects! Resources!! Quality Skill Set Scalability, stretching vs Risking existing resources What if we could not support our clients with different services? Not knowing the language might make the quality a nightmare Should we add more resources? And in which areas??!

Resolution … Resources Find communicate Ask for Feedback Assess Training Ask for Feedback Resources Conferences (local), LI, Proz SMS as important mean of communication in some areas! Get reference for assessing and arbitrating to qualify

Resolution … Resources Recognition Commitment

Resolution … Resources Freelance Vs. LSP

Resolution … Quality! Process Automate Measure Criteria Who Reference 3rd Party tools Your own Automate 3rd party tools Human! Measure

Resolution … Quality!

Resolution … Quality!

Resolution … Skillset! Analyze skills. Add Roles/Jobs Automation for similar tasks Decide on Service Resource coordination Engineering for Testing! VO Studios!

Gains… Responsiveness to your customers

The End … 15 African Languages 13 BiDi and ME languages/Dialects 22 Asian and Indic languages

The End … scary