Start-up — Global by Design

Why start-ups are different

The start-up culture and structure allows small, nimble organizations to develop highly innovative products and services and take them to market quickly.
Successful start-ups are generally believed to be more scalable than established businesses, in that they have the potential to grow rapidly with a limited investment of capital and labor.
In today’s global age, the ability to scale often includes the ability to supply your products to overseas markets and so the requirement for internationalization and localization is evident from the outset. This, along with an emphasis on agility, cost effectiveness, and probably a small internal team with little experience of localization can create both opportunities and challenges for language service providers to deliver high-quality translation services to tight deadlines.

Agile and flexible

Typically, start-ups developing a product will use some variant of agile methodology and will look to develop their product quickly and include extensive feature sets to ensure a competitive edge.
To gain maximum benefit from their language provider, start-ups would do well to bring them into the process at an early stage and provide information on product development and release schedules, as well as target markets, etc.
Good translation companies are used to being able to scale quickly and dealing with content without much context, highly pressurized deadlines, price constraints, and a variety of file and delivery formats. All would agree, however, that they are able to provide a better, higher quality, more cost effective service if there is good, open communication and some information about schedules and key dates.

An extension of the team

Your language service provider will be able to work with you and provide an optimum service if they are aware of things like release dates. For example, you may have to do a demo of the software at a certain stage in development, maybe for funding purposes, or for a potential buyer, but it may be appreciated that this is not the fully developed model, and that content and even design and features may still be subject to change. In such cases, there may not be the same quality requirement as there would be for the final product. Your provider will be able to work with you and provide a “fit for purpose” product that can be done at a reduced cost, perhaps using gist machine translation or offering a very quick first pass translation. This will be much quicker and cheaper than the usual quality product, but can still be retained for later reuse.
A good language service provider will also be able to assist with knowledge of locales, internationalization services, and creative and design input to optimize effort for different regions.
Involving your language service provider at an early stage will also result in maximum efficiency and quality in the translation process, ensuring that texts are appropriately reused and guaranteeing consistency across components for a global go-to-market strategy.

Technology

The language industry employs a number of technologies that a small, agile, forward-looking company might want to leverage, including translation memory, translation management systems and the use of machine translation. All of these options can offer significant value if utilized in the right way, at the right time, and with the right content. Your language service provider should be able to advise you on the right technologies for your business.
When considering which technologies may be useful, again, it is good to take a forward-thinking approach and think about how you might scale your business, what marketplaces and languages will be required in the future, and the importance of being able to supply new locales quickly and effectively. If you are really only looking at a small number of territories, or your content is quite static and will not require quick and numerous updates, then the need for workflow technology or integration into content repositories, for example, may not be as important.
The use of machine translation may be appropriate for some types of content but is unlikely to provide the solution for all. This technology also requires work in terms of authoring, set-up and review cycles, so it is worth speaking to your provider about if and where it may be appropriate.

The future

A lot of start-up organizations aim to disrupt their industry and to grow quickly, so the services and support they will require will also expand, probably over a short period of time. It is important, when looking for a service provider, to find a company that has the ability and vision to be able to provide the level of service you need, both now and into the future. Working with an organization that recognizes the challenges you are facing and has the right solutions will make for a smoother relationship and for a deeper understanding of business requirements.

What’s in it for language service providers?

For language service providers, start-ups are ideal customers for some specialist services such as on-demand translation services. Due to their nature, start-up organizations will often have small requirements that require fast turnaround. Start-ups may also need services such as testing: due to their tightly controlled budgets, resource limitations and requirement to meet quality standards, testing can become a burden on start-up organizations and service providers that can offer functional, linguistic, and other testing services can find themselves in demand within the start-up community.
Finally, smaller organizations also find it beneficial to be able to call on expertise about locales, both from a linguistic perspective but also, and perhaps especially, from a design point of view: look and feel, UI elements, use of colors, etc. This ensures that releases on new markets are as efficient and timely as possible.
So, in summary, start-ups are, of course, looking for all the standard localization services, but when selecting a partner, they should also be aware of some of the more niche offerings that will add additional benefit to their ability to scale globally.