#GALAExperts - How Can LSPs Become Future-Proof? (1)

A new instalment of #GALAExperts, a GALA blog series where we ask translation industry experts inside and outside the GALA community for their insights and advice on managing business processes and digital transformation. Do you have a burning or knotty question? Send it to us and we’ll ask our experts.

Today we ask our experts to answer the following question:

What services will dive LSPs out of the pandemic crisis and help them become future-proof?

Mladen Stojak, Chief Strategy Officer at Ciklopea

"In my view, the pandemic crisis has actually accelerated certain business processes that had already been in place, more than it has brought brand new challenges. And I believe that the biggest part of the problem comes from our ability or inability to keep up with that speed. I am talking about two closely related phenomena. The first one is digital transformation and the second one is content explosion.

There is no question that both these phenomena present huge opportunities for LSPs because they bring increasing localization demands. But, at the same time, they require increased process agility and data traceability. That may be challenging to the existing paradigms. 

Rather than talking about specific services that could help LSPs overcome the crisis, I would like to address these aspects of the new reality that should be the basis for an organic growth and development of services that might help align the industry with the existing demands. 

Content is exploding as we all know, and in all directions, increasingly produces to reach the growing global digital audiences. This inevitably leads to an information overload. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to process all this data in a meaningful way. 

All this means that we eventually have to deal with two major issues: traceability and quality. To address the problem of traceability, we should provide our clients with a detailed breakdown of all translation and localization related costs that will help the client's localization and marketing department (as well as the people who are leading that department) with their internal assessment of the localization effort and of the justification of those expenses.

In this respect, we have found QBR (quarterly business review) very useful. Running a regular QBR with a client and providing them with a clear overview of values and benefits that we provide for them has certainly become the norm and it also gives us an opportunity to inform the client about additional benefits that we may provide.

To address the issue of quality, we have to take into consideration that AI is being used on all fronts to keep up with the required speed. This can potentially compromise the quality. For this reason, we need to be cautious and amend our processes by integrating the latest technologies, such as AI, powered MT, with increased professional human supervision."