#127 | Talking Translation with Michael Becker of Identity Praxis

ATTENTION:  Below is a machine-generated transcription of the podcast. Yes, here at Rapport International we talk a lot about how machine translation lacks quality. Here you see an example of what a machine can do in your own language. This transcription is provided as a gist and to give time indicators to find a topic of interest.

Michael Becker: Hi, this is Michael Becker. I'm the CEO of Identity Praxis, as well as the Mobile Ecosystem Forum Identity and Data Chair. And with me today is Wendy Pease. She is the President and Owner of Rapport International. Wendy, welcome. 

Thanks for joining us.  

Wendy Pease: Hi, Michael. It's great to be here. Always enjoy talking to you.  

Michael Becker: Yeah, it's fun. So let's just jump right in and, you know, maybe you can give us a little bit of background of who you are and what Rapport International does, and then we'll get right into the meat of our conversation today, which is about translation. 

Wendy Pease: Sure. Well, I am president and owner of Rapport International. We've been around for over 35 years. I've been the company owner for 20 years. And we provide language services and that is high quality written translation [00:03:00] and spoken interpretation. We do everything from one language to another, except for teaching. 

Michael Becker: Okay. And what does that mean? What do you mean except for teaching?  

Wendy Pease: If somebody wants to learn a language, that's not one of our expertises, you know, to do tutoring or run classes.  

Michael Becker: I see. So the use cases you have then are to take corporate documents, corporate websites, mobile apps, you know, applications and translate the language strings within those experiences, so that they can be used in different cultures in different environments. 

Wendy Pease: Exactly. And so that would be all translation. So that's written. And then interpretation is anything spoken. So it's like when you have a person who's standing up and helping a presenter connect with the audience across languages, it can be over a webinar, a video conference, or it can be by telephone, and translation and interpretation have very different meanings in the industry, but you'll see the terms used interchangeably. 

But it drives me nuts. It's like nails on a chalkboard. When I hear [00:04:00] somebody say the president's translator said, because that would be an interpreter who's saying something, the president's translator would be doing the documents behind the scenes in the back office.  

Michael Becker: Okay, I never really thought about that distinction. 

So that's kind of fun in an academic kind of way, or even practical kind of way. So translation is actually taking the written words and putting them into the written word of another language and interpretation is hearing the audio version of it, and then the, aka interpreter restating that in the appropriate language. 

Wendy Pease: Yes. So the only one that has me confused is a live chat person. So an AI chat or a chat bot is still translation because you programmed it all behind the scenes and it's written. But a live chat person is actually facilitating live conversation, but it's through a written format. So that's the only area where interpreting and translation gets intermingled. 

Michael Becker: Awesome. Really interesting. In our prepared remarks, as we kind of talked about this , we wanted to [00:05:00] start with like, what's some of the brief history of translation and how it got started.  

We'll go through the transition of what's bad translation. What does good translation look like and how do we do it right? And then in particularly since we're focused in the area of mobile, what are the distinctions when we're thinking about doing translation within the mobile context, say on the mobile phone, the watch, the tablet, those kinds of things. 

And then we're going to look at what's going forward. Is that kind of a good agenda for us today?  

Wendy Pease: That sounds perfect.  

Michael Becker: Awesome. So with that in mind, tell us, what are the roots of translation?  

Wendy Pease: Well the roots of translations go back to the Rosetta Stone. I mean that was the first written translation history that we have and I went over and saw the Rosetta Stone in the museum in London and got such a kick out of it. 

I bought socks with it. So translation has been going on through humanity when it's gotten really interesting is when we add machines into translation and people talk about Google Translate and AI, like this automated translation is something new, but it's actually [00:06:00] not, it actually started in World War II when the fighting factions were trying to do code breaking or spying and understanding what the different codes were being said in the other languages. And so there was machine translation back then, and it was very based on word to word. And then after the war, there was a ton of funding that went into it. 

And they said, okay, word for word doesn't seem to act because of the grammatical structure of languages. Let's add the grammar rules into it and see if that works. And it still didn't work. And then it took many years to launch Google Translate, that came out in what, the two thousands and we're still having problems with it. 

And so language is a very dynamic living thing, and you know, I live in New England. You live in California. Speech patterns, word choices, how people communicate. And then you add the South in, just in English, and you look at different types of speaking [00:07:00] that can go on in geographies, let alone adding in a different language with different language laws. 

 I hosted one of the guys, Adam Bittlingmayer, that was on the founding committee of Google Translate and was working in that knee deep. And he said, what automated translation has done is provide bad translation for humanity. It's better than it was, it's raised the visibility of our industry, but it's not trustworthy yet if you're trying to increase your revenues or decrease your liability. 

Michael Becker: Okay. So let's first talk about like what bad translation is. So you, you brought up some interesting things. Word for word doesn't make sense because it doesn't grab nuance or grammar, and you mentioned this idea of language laws, which I find interesting. 

Presumably if you do translation poorly, you run into some language law issues, culturally and across jurisdictions?  

Wendy Pease: Oh, yeah, yeah. So if you're doing legal translation, you need to understand the laws of the country where it's going to be [00:08:00] used because we may have legal doctrines here in the United States when we write something that may not be applicable in other countries. 

So there is no direct translation. Another place there's no direct translation is in IP translation. When you're naming something, you've got to think about how you're registering for it and describing for it across different countries because there isn't something like that before. And so you have to think about what's the most logical way to do it. 

And there's kind of three different ways to do it that we talk through with our clients. But, yeah, , if we do medical translation for people here in the United States, we have to use a translator that's based here in the United States. So they understand the medical system, you know, trying to explain American insurance laws to somebody who's only lived in China and is completely fluent in English. 

They may not get it.  

Michael Becker: I'm sorry, I'm trying to explain American insurance laws to someone who's born here. [00:09:00] You may not get it, right? Like, I'm one of them, it's pretty complicated.  

Wendy Pease: Good point.  

Michael Becker: Maybe you can give me some examples of bad translations. So you've got a few, like, Got Milk, Electrolux. Why did you kind of bring these out as examples of bad translations? 

Wendy Pease: Sure. Well, Electrolux is one of my favorite because it's English to English translation and not doing your research before you launch. So it's tagline over in the UK was, it sucks, it sucks well. And so that's what the point they were trying to get across, but they came here to the US. 

Michael Becker: I'm assuming Electrolux in that context is a vacuum cleaner or something?  

Wendy Pease: Vacuum cleaner. Yes. Sorry for those of you who are not familiar with the Electrolux vacuum cleaner. That's what we're talking about. And so coming over here and putting your brand name next to it sucks, which means it's really bad or it's terrible. 

Not a good tagline. So it didn't work well. The got milk. was translated into Tiene Leche, [00:10:00] which means, are you lactating? Rather, because it's the got, like, do you have milk? But if you speak Spanish, the literal way you'd ask for it is, is there milk? Ay leche. 

You don't say, do you have? And so that was translated and plastered across billboards and everything. And so any Spanish speakers really got a chuckle out of it.  

Michael Becker: Oh, that's hysterical actually. Yeah.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah. So Braniff, you know, the airline, they were talking about their leather seats. And so they wanted to push that. 

So they said, vuela and cuelo, which they thought was leather, but it translates into fly naked.  

Michael Becker: Fly naked?  

Wendy Pease: Maybe sales shot up, but maybe not, but it wasn't the image they wanted to give. Another Middle Eastern country was launching here was detergent and it was called barf detergent. 

They, you know, tried to launch [00:11:00] it here and they didn't rename it. It became Barf Translation, so these are the ones going into English. Like I got a whole bunch of other ones when, you know, into Chinese and the meanings of those. And these are all done by humans. 

These are non expert translators, let alone getting into some of the Google ones. Now I got tons of examples of those too. You want to hear some of those?  

Michael Becker: Sure.  

Wendy Pease: One of my favorites is Kummerspeck. It's a German word that means overeating when you're depressed or sad. You know how you just keep grabbing for the cookies or the ice cream or something? 

If you put that into Google Translate, it translates literally into grief bacon.  

Michael Becker: Grief bacon. I like grief bacon.  

Wendy Pease: I know. That's a good one. Another one that I liked was the Mazda tagline. Their tagline was jimba ite in Japanese. And what that means is you're like a warrior riding a [00:12:00] horse going across the plains with your bow and arrow in and it's like, It's that pure moment when everything's in alignment and feels just right. 

So that's a great tagline for a car because you're driving it, you're just in that moment, but there's no direct translation for that into English. And so putting it into Google Translate, I've gotten a couple of different things. The first time it came out is danger.  

Michael Becker: Okay. Not one term you want to associate with your car? 

Wendy Pease: No. The second time I put it in, it came out as one horse.  

Michael Becker: Okay.  

Wendy Pease: Again, not something you want to do with your car.  

Michael Becker: Unless you have a Ford, from the 1900s, right?  

Wendy Pease: And then the final time that I tried it, it just said Jinba, so it didn't even give a translation. So these are the nuances that you really could be endangering yourself with if you're using automated translation without human involvement. 

 Sometimes we'll get people that will [00:13:00] send a translation and say, this has been done by AI or Google, can you just have a human in the loop and our translators just shake their head and they go, it's so clunky for me to edit this to anything that makes sense. 

I'd rather just start from the beginning.  

Michael Becker: Yeah, so those are great examples of bad translation. How do we do it right? In the world of AI, the world of computing, we just can't do everything manual anymore. We do need to adopt these tools and we should not be afraid of them. 

But how do we go about doing it right? How do we actually start building intellectual property as we do it as an organization and making it faster and easier for our companies and our partners to be able to work with us?  

Wendy Pease: I wrote a whole book on that. It's called The Language of Global Marketing. 

You can find it on Amazon. There's an audio book, there's an ebook, and there's a hard copy book. So whatever way you want it, but it goes through all of why you should even be thinking about doing global marketing. People are finding you if you have a website, even [00:14:00] if you're based in one country. How do you read the metrics? 

How do you think about it? How do you develop a strategy? And then we look at process. One of the segments is technology. So technology is here to stay. We research it, we embrace what works, we throw away what doesn't, and we do a lot of advising on clients with it. The technology that has been working in the translation industry is if you translate something once, you can put it into a translation memory and it retains that, so if you're translating that again, it can pull the copy up and you don't have to do it again. 

Smart translators love it because they don't have to redo work that they've already done. Marketers, business people, everybody who's uses translation likes it because they get consistency of voice and they're not wasting money for paying for it again.  

Michael Becker: So from a practical perspective, though, what is translation memory? 

Do I have a little brain in a bucket sitting next to my desk? Or is there, is it a spreadsheet or is it a database? I mean, how does one actually implement a translation memory? [00:15:00]  

Wendy Pease: It depends on how much translation you're doing, and all the technologies depend on how much translation you're doing. If you're doing your birth certificate because you want to go to school someplace, you're not going to use translation memory. 

If you're doing documents that aren't repetitive. Say you're a marketing person and you're releasing new SKUs all the time. Probably, translation memory is not going to help that much except for if you have company disclosures or things that you put in instruction manuals over and over again. 

If you're something like, and I use this example in the book, like TripAdvisor, who is using the same words on their platform. It's like number of people that can stay there, washer and dryer, distance from the train, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, stuff like that. That you'd use machine translation for because you're always using those words and so if you can come up with a standard way to write with standard [00:16:00] protocols and you build it into your process and you educate your team about it, then translation memory and maybe even some automated translation makes sense.  

Michael Becker: Just enter its own practicality sentence. 

As you're running it through the machine, if it sees a particular word, it looks it up in a dictionary or a database, basically, and says, Oh, this is the correct word for this language.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah, doing word by word would be a glossary. So if you always call, a handbag, a purse, as opposed to a pocketbook or a handbag, then, you'd be consistent with that, and then you'd have that word translation. 

With translation memory, you're looking more for paragraphs or strings of words that you always put together. So you've got a glossary, you've got your translation memory. Then the next step is for really large companies that have the force that can manage it, is building your LLM, Language Learning Model. 

So, ChatGPT is an [00:17:00] LLM. I can go in there and I can ask for a translation of something. And that is going to go out and it's going to pull from the internet and industry research is now finding that there's so much Google Translate on the internet that when ChatGPT pulls it in, it's taken all those crappy translations and it's spitting it back to you. 

But it's looking at like the percentages of where it's used. And so just leaning on chat GPT to get your translation is not going to be good enough. You'd need to build your own internal one that can recognize the types of words, the expertise that you have and pull it together. And then what happens is if you don't manage the hallucinations well, then you can end up with junk being spit out. 

So , it's always a good idea, unless you're managing your translation memory or your LLM closely, well, even if you're managing it closely, to have a human in [00:18:00] the loop, so hallucinations don't get in there.  

Michael Becker: And that's just the process of training and feeding it more and more documents so it can build it patterns. 

Wendy Pease: So you're an academic, you like research studies? We did a light research study across the industry and there was a group of us that got together and one person pulled some content from an actual client project and he said, okay, I'm gonna have a bad human do it, Google Translate do one version, 

ChatGPT do one version. And then I'm going to do a version of ChatGPT and Google Translate and run that through together and maybe that'll clean it up really well. You want to take a guess as to which one was the best?  

Michael Becker: I couldn't even imagine. Tell me.  

Wendy Pease: It was such an interesting thing to go through. 

So the bad human made a spelling error.  

Michael Becker: You're saying bad human.  

Wendy Pease: Bad human translator. So not a professional translator. 

Michael Becker: Not a professional. Okay. Not yet. So not a non professional translator. Got it. [00:19:00]  

Wendy Pease: Non professional translator. It could have been professional, but I don't know how they were qualified, but there was a typo in it. 

You know, so ChatGPT and Google Translate are probably not going to give you typos. Okay, Google Translate was clunky to read. I mean, you're just reading it and you're going, okay, what's the message I'm supposed to get here? ChatGPT was similar. That was also very clunky and hard to read. The best one to read and clear was the ChatGPT Google Translate version. 

But the problem was, it was wrong. It was just wrong. And it was about a very difficult subject matter and it took the meeting and changed it to equalize out between the parties that were disputing. And so if that had actually gone through, it missed the mark altogether.  

Michael Becker: So they were all bad. 

Wendy Pease: They were all bad. That's why it's really [00:20:00] important to have a subject matter expert, detail oriented translator, a qualified professional to actually do it. So they don't give you the typos and the grammar errors.  

Michael Becker: I have found that too. ChatGPT doesn't want to not know the answer. So if it doesn't know the answer, it will make it up. 

Yeah. With great authority and it can be very convincing. Yeah. Read well, it sounds perfect. And if you don't know the difference, you don't know that it's complete BS.  

Wendy Pease: Yes. Yes. That's what's worrisome. And so if you're writing in English, you can go through and you can pull up the BS, for translation, you've got to be really careful. 

But on the other hand, I'm a huge fan of it because if I get an unsolicited email and I want to know if it's a potential quiet client inquiry or spam, I pop it in there. It's free.  

Michael Becker: Again, or it's not, it's 20 bucks a month if you want the GPT 4 and that's not a big deal, but for me, I find it directional, right? 

 So someone was [00:21:00] coaching me and not just ChatGPT, there are others in the LLM models. Think of them as your fairly well informed friend that you can ask any question to at any time, day or night. And knowing that friend has a tendency to kind of BS every once in a while and may have some bravado in there. 

So you got to take it a little bit with grain of salt, but directionally, they're generally in the right direction. So they can kind of say, yeah, it's probably over there somewhere. You'll get close enough. You know, and if you keep following that and giving it the appropriate prompts, you can train it and ultimately get there. 

And I saw it's an incredibly valuable coach, but it's not going to play the game for you. The coach is not going to do the job for you. We still need a human to do the job today.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah. If you look at what you want to translate, build out a process or procedure manual to tell your people, your staff, what they can use it for. 

If it's something that's confidential, don't put it out there. I mean, we've got, [00:22:00] confidentiality agreements out everywhere and in ownership, that's another thing. If you want it to remain confidential and you want to retain ownership of it because you have a copyright on it, then don't put it out on Google Translator ChatGPT because you don't do that going to an agency that uses humans that are under a confidentiality agreement and do this as a profession. 

And an agency who's building on the translation memory, you're not going to get hallucinations. You keep the confidentiality and you keep the ownership of it.  

Michael Becker: Well, that's another argument. If you have a large enough scale to warrant the cost, the expect expense and the learning curves in your own in house LLM , really an important idea and thought. 

And those LLMs are free and they're out there and they're easy to download and you can use them. You just gotta be so inclined to be able to get some help with that. So we've talked about a little bit about what bad translation looks like. 

How do we do it using these different forms of technology and steps and not bad human, the [00:23:00] professional human, and then some of the best practices that you talked about doing it right. Process and procedures, taking care of confidentiality, using translation memory, you know, keeping consideration of the language laws, and I don't just mean legal language. 

I mean, what is legally allowed to be used as language that varies by country, right? Yeah. You can say certain words on TV in one country that you can't in another, for example.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah.  

Michael Becker: And I'm sure that's the case in writing as well. So those are other best practices you talked about, but when it comes to now implementation, can you talk to us a little bit about space and dimensions like paper versus a billboard versus , a mobile app or a mobile watch or a website? 

What are some of the best practices you have as we take all of this translation work into the confines of a smaller and smaller screen? Or into that mobile space, or really if I go to the next step, and we hadn't really talked about this before, but it just popped in my head when we start going into voice assistants. 

[00:24:00] So, we actually start having people read our translations and it's being used by a voice assistant, like an Alexa or something like that.  

Wendy Pease: Lots of good questions there. Well, one of the main things about translation and thinking about smaller screens or any layout is that translation expands when you're going into a target language. 

So you have your source language, which is the originally the target language is what you're going into. A German word that I like for this is the tagline for Volkswagen that is Fahrvergnugen. In German, that's one word, but in English, it's the pleasure of driving. So it's four words, so you can see that's going to take more space to say than the original word. 

So this is called expansion when we're doing translation in the industry.  

Michael Becker: How do you spell fahrvergnugen?  

Wendy Pease: F A R. Do you remember that tagline?  

Michael Becker: I can't say that I do  

Wendy Pease: Yeah, [00:25:00] fahrvergnugen, FAR. I thought I had it written down here somewhere. Can I send it to you?  

Michael Becker: Yeah, send it to me and we'll put it in the blog or I'll post it. 

But the pleasure of driving. So that's really interesting. That's one of the, I love the German words for that reason. One word can impact so much meaning from our context in the English language.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah. With expansion, you have to keep in mind that where you think that you have a very minimal space and you're gonna translate it, it's gonna take more space. 

So we allow for 20 to 30% expansion when we're actually looking at a translation project. So if you're looking at doing a translation and you're gonna use it on a brochure, and then the website, and then a flyer, and then , a mobile app, or whatever. I'm trying to think across all the modalities to save money. 

 You do the translation once and then you use the same one. Going to a mobile app, you have a lot less space and you already [00:26:00] have to be a lot more smart about how you get the messages across with those words. And so if you plan on translating it, just consider that you're going to have the expansion. 

The other is that languages vary by country. Like if you think, of English to English. You can think of runners versus sneakers, jumpers versus sweater. There's all sorts of words that we use different in English. Same with French, like courriel is the word for email that's used in Canada, but over in France, they'll use the word email. 

So where you might think you might be able to use the same words, you have to check where the app's going to be downloaded, and can you control that, or can you get something that's understood enough. You've got to think about colors, because where white is wedding in the US, white means funeral in China. 

[00:27:00] You got to think about what buttons people are pushing and what are the normal shapes and colors to call out for that. Programming. Ah, one of the big mistakes that I see tech companies do, particularly in the United States is they develop an app or a program, and they don't think about taking it global later on because they think the US market is big enough and they're a small company and then all of a sudden they get to globalization and they realize that their program isn't set up to be used with different characters or languages, you know, fonts and tilde and all the different marks that might need to be. 

So if you're building new programs, make sure that it can accommodate translation, different words and different characters. 

Michael Becker: Fantastic. So as we kind of wrap up our conversation today, where do we go from here? So it seems like we've got this really interesting primordial soup of industry best practice and large language models and Google Translate and other types of capabilities and [00:28:00] design considerations. 

Where do we go? And what's the human's role in translation? Will one day the GPTs and LLM models just get it right and we're all out of work? Or is the human always going to be involved? And that pops up another idea in my question too. What's the role of creativity and intuition in all of this as well? So maybe you can talk to us about like, what's next?  

Wendy Pease: Sure. Well, there's a lot in those questions. So I'll start with just kind of thinking through the future of language and automation. I've been following closely for the last 15 years as Google Translate was coming out and I can remember people saying, Oh, well, is Google Translate going to put you out of business? 

And I was like, I don't know. We'll see. Then as I was going to conferences and talking to people, they'd say I need that kind of translation that captures the meaning and I'm like, yeah, culturally adapted translation. Then ChatGPT came out and again, threw a panic, is this going [00:29:00] to put us out of business and less panic this time because we've been through Google Translate and realize that no, it's not, it could change. And it's like writers are making the adaptation of, they can leverage it to get ideas and it's creative and spitting back stuff that's already been out on the internet or combining words. I love writing poems on ChatGPT because you can put in three different words and say write me a poem and then you can say shorten it and then you can say tune it down to a five year old. 

So you can play around with creativity there, but pure creativity comes from humans still. So where I see humans are going to be involved is keeping language alive. There's three to six thousand languages in the world, depending on who you talk to, and we're losing a lot of languages because of globalization. 

TV, Netflix, people expanding, not being able to have jobs in [00:30:00] small villages, and so people moving off to the cities, becoming bilingual, the ease of travel, younger people traveling at a younger age and liking the international cultures, people in the US keeping their language. And so, with all these things coming together, there's fewer languages, but within those languages, they're changing all the time. 

We have 3000 words a year added into Webster's Dictionary and every six months they'll come out with the new words and they take words away. One of the words they took away once was mulberry and it kind of cracked me up. I guess we don't use it that much, but there is that rhyme here. We go around the mulberry bush. 

So it's a living, changing thing.  

Michael Becker: When you're saying they're taking it away. I mean, in a digital world, I would see it. I could see taking away words for print because you're printing the book and we're not using that word anymore so why put the ink on paper but the word's still out there so when you say they're taking it away they're [00:31:00] officially like retiring the word or how does that work? 

Wendy Pease: Yeah, I just know that they come out of there. They're taking it out of the dictionary. So I don't think you can officially retire a word because people could start using it again or somebody could name a device something from an old word. I used to have a little dictionary from 1932. 

It was about the size of my iPhone. And now if you look at a dictionary, they're massive. Now you don't even look at dictionaries because you just go online. My point is that language is always changing. New words are coming out. New technologies are coming out that we need. 

 Internet wasn't even a word 20, 30 years ago.  

Michael Becker: I remember that when the internet first came out, there was a great show with Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, and they were trying to figure out how to say the at sign. They couldn't figure out how to actually read an email address and that was absolutely hysterical. 

Wendy Pease: Yeah, and now my kids don't even read their emails. If you don't text them, they don't respond. Things are changing [00:32:00] so quickly and that's how language is. I don't even know if we'll get to the point where you can get a clear well written translation from ChatGPT because you can't get something that's clearly written now without having a human in the loop. 

So it might go to you don't have language experts, but you have experts in subject matter that speak two languages, which we've been doing for years. I mean, we always look for somebody who's fully bilingual, trained translator, and has subject matter expertise. So, that's where I'm more excited in our industry about the prospect of how can we leverage the translation and how does it get better. 

I see a lot of people that put Google Translate the plugin on their website. Maybe it meets the law of you've made language accessible, but if you've ever tried to go to a Google translated site and read it and actually buy from it, [00:33:00] you're not going to do it. I do it for fun. 

Michael Becker: Yeah. But again, though, too, if it helps directionally, that's one thing. It depends on the purpose. If it's not professional or if you're a small startup and you don't have the funds and it directionally works great, but if you're a larger corporation, and your brand matters and your experience matters at every point along the customer journey, then investing in that matters because that's the difference between increasing revenues, or reducing costs, or exposing your company to risk, right? To unnecessary liabilities. So in that recontext, as we kind of concluding the thought, which just pops into my head, translation is really critical to a company's risk assurance model, right? 

Oh yeah. Depending on the level of risk to that you want to adopt as you enter into a market or, an engagement. Translation has to be part of the risk calculus.  

Wendy Pease: Absolutely. And that's what I talk about in the book, The Language of Global Marketing. In there, I'm talking about risk and [00:34:00] liability and what are you willing to take on. 

And there's been all sorts of cases. We write blogs about them when we come up with them of liability. There was a high school athlete that went into the hospital and they said, I can't remember intoxicado spelling it looks like intoxicated, you know, intoxicado. I'm badgering the Spanish word to make the point for English readers. 

 The doctors thought it was intoxicated. And so they treated him for drinking over, but it wasn't that. He had something else in his system that was very poison that was very treatable. And he was an athlete and didn't actually drink. And so there was a huge liability case against the hospital. 

So I worry about some of these automated translating devices and the automated translating on Google and referring to those. You hop in a taxi and you want to get somebody somewhere or chit chat. Yeah, use it. But if you're an organization, you better have that [00:35:00] outlined as to what you're going to do. And then think strategically if you're a mobile device is how can you boil down those words to the shortest thing that you can so people can actually read it. 

Michael Becker: Yeah. And then appropriately interact with the experience. Yeah. Fantastic. So as we wrap up, what are the two, three things, just people that are listening to this, and I've got a list of best practices I'll put in the followup blog article, but what are the two or three things that people should think about doing today, tomorrow, and in the future? 

Where do they go to start learning about this now? What should they be thinking about? I got to go do this immediately. And this is what I need to think about doing in the future and then off way in the future. What would you recommend?  

Wendy Pease: My recommendation for global marketing and translation is number one. 

First, think about it, put it on your radar screen because less than 5 percent of US companies export. And even if you're only operating in the US, look around your neighborhood and look at who your potential buyers are. I know in the town next to us, [00:36:00] they have a lot of, Portuguese speakers. 

And so restaurants and shops and dry cleaners and printers can attract the Portuguese speakers in. Whereas the town south of me, there's a lot of Spanish speakers. If you have a website, you're selling internationally, look at where you're getting visitors from because you're probably attracting. 

So pay attention to your statistics and think global and at least put a landing page up there that welcomes people in language. That can dramatically increase your sales. Number two, develop a strategy for your language outreach. Okay, what is your buyer's journey and what are the key steps in the buyer's journey where you need to touch somebody and then translate that material? 

And you don't have to have a huge budget to add in high quality translation for that. The third is, think globally from the start. So often, companies will think number one, think number two, and then it's a [00:37:00] reactive process for how they get their translation done. So there's the Language Maturity Model, which we have on our website, Rapport Translations, if you just search in the search bar for the Language Maturity Model, we have articles about this from an industry think tank, and it talks about the stages that organizations go through. 

First, it's reactive, then they might have some management in it, and then they're strategic about it. I'm summarizing for the benefit of here. But if you can be aware of that early on, how do you grow your company to be more welcoming and inclusive to buyers that don't speak English well, because the research shows that people want to buy in their native language because that makes them feel more comfortable and they understand. 

Michael Becker: Again, to your point, while only 5 percent of US companies export, living in California, there's Spanish everywhere. It's not a matter of exporting it to your point. And then in native language, they may be born in the US and [00:38:00] they're born into English, a. k. a. 

that's their native language, but their home language is Spanish because they're speaking with grandma and mom and that point, people want to buy in that language, their cradle language, if you will, or that family language. 

Wendy Pease: And people are keeping their native languages. 

And for fun, go watch Telemundo or Univision and look at what brands advertise on there and look at how they've adapted their ads to hit the US or to attract the US Spanish speaking. I always turn Spanish speaking TV on for the Olympics. I particularly like to do it. And you have the major car brands, the fast food, the consumer products, they're all advertising in Spanish for the Spanish speaking US market. It's a huge growing market with tons of money and they like brand names. I say they, as a population, Hispanics in the US tend to buy brand names .  

Michael Becker: Fantastic, and maybe later you could send us some links so we can put them in the comments in the chat about the Language Maturity Model. 

 If you can point us at that research, people want to buy in their [00:39:00] own native language, if we can get some stats about that, that would be great. And then also if you can follow up with a link to your book so that we can promote that too, that would be awesome.  

Wendy Pease: Okay, and I'll send you the spelling of fahrvergnugen, too. 

Michael Becker: Good follow up. I really like that. But Wendy, hey, this was a really enjoyable conversation. Thank you very much.  

Wendy Pease: Oh, thank you for having me, Michael. Always great to talk to you.  

Michael Becker: One last thing, how do people get a hold of you? LinkedIn, email, website? Like, what, where do they go if they want to get a hold of you? 

Wendy Pease: Sure, I'm everywhere. If you know of LinkTree, it's great. L I N K T R dot E E slash Wendy Pease. W E N D Y, P as in Peter, E A S E. You can go there to find all my links to all my social medias. I'm very active on LinkedIn. You can find my email there. You can find a free few chapters of the book if you're interested in checking that out. 

 Website. So, that's the easiest place to go.  

Michael Becker: All right. Well, Wendy, thank you again. Take [00:40:00] care. Okay. Bye bye. Bye bye.