Translation and internationalisation in business: the challenge

Constant Conil-Lacoste is Head of Sales for France at the online translation company TextMaster. Following stints at Deezer and Doctolib, Constant joined TextMaster in 2018 as an Account Executive to help clients streamline their translation processes. At the end of 2019, Constant took over as head of TextMaster’s French sales team.

What are the current challenges facing your users?

In the current climate, our clients need more than ever to capitalise on their online presence and the sale of their products and services via their websites, apps and marketplaces. They need agile service providers who can adapt to their strategic shifts in target markets and the distribution of their product and service catalogues.

In other words, they are drawing on their ingenuity to maintain their turnover, and we must offer them flexibility in terms of:

• opportunity cost and time-to-market, thanks to our translation memory and proofread machine translation technologies,
• processes by connecting directly to the tools they use on a day-to-day basis to manage their content (PIM, CMS, marketplace feed aggregators) to spare them the time-consuming tasks of exporting and importing data.

What are the main barriers to international expansion?

The main barriers we observe are:

• Translations of non-native, unprofessional or 100 per cent machine-translated quality, which have a twofold negative effect: a loss of consumer trust and penalties from Google in target markets,
• Regulatory hurdles! For example, we have clients who have given up on tapping into the UK market because of Brexit,
• A lack of an SEO strategy.

What results have you seen among your clients who have a good grasp of their PXM?

Once the implementation phase is complete, one of the benefits we hear about is increased efficiency in processes. Product and media data is standardised (and therefore complete for the client), stored in one place, and many tasks are automated.

On the international front, PXM enables the translation process to be centralised with a single service provider that is directly connected, which puts an end to data imports and exports and allows for streamlining and cost monitoring.

The combination of these two benefits results in a much faster time-to-market.

What are your predictions for this year?

I’m predicting that post-edited machine translation (PEMT) will become widespread across all sectors. These engines enable our professional, native-speaking translators to work more efficiently across an ever-increasing number of languages.

I’m also predicting a strong recovery in the tourism sector this summer. Here’s hoping that as many businesses as possible have managed to stay afloat and will return with refined strategies to serve consumers who are just waiting for this!

How did you set up the TM x Quable partnership?

Our collaboration began with our first shared client: Club Med. Our shared SaaS and start-up DNA enabled us to integrate our solutions quickly.

With the launch of the “multi-select cart” feature this month, Quable users can now manage 100 per cent of their translation volumes whilst saving time. They have access to their favourite translators, their translation memory and their project management dashboard (pricing, progress, history).

Any final thoughts?

We’ll soon be hosting a webinar with Quable! This will be an opportunity to showcase our recent developments and answer questions from international companies considering implementing a PIM solution and/or, more generally, improving the localisation processes for their product catalogues.