Q&A with Mark Lawyer, General Manager for Trados

Last month we announced the appointment of four new general managers to our Language and Content Technology division, who will hold responsibility for our product lines. As Thomas Labarthe, President of the division, explained, “these appointments will ensure that we will be able to continue delivering an outstanding service and continually innovate our technology products in order to support our clients with their language and content challenges.” 

 

Over the next few weeks we’ll be speaking to our general managers to find out more about their role, how they’re helping clients to address their challenges and their views on some of the big industry trends. First up is Mark Lawyer, General Manager for Trados. Mark is tasked with helping clients to unlock global understanding with Trados, a family of intelligent products capable of handling the entire end-to-end translation supply chain.

As General Manager for Trados, I’m excited to lead our cloud first strategy across the Trados family of products. I’m responsible for Trados Enterprise, Trados Team and Trados Studio amongst other products in our language technology stack. The most important element of my role is delighting our clients, which are comprised of individual translators, Language Service Providers (LSP) and corporations. If you put these three client segments together, this makes up the end-to-end localization supply chain; giving us a unique position to serve all aspects of the localization supply chain with an intelligent system (pretty cool). Making our clients' lives easier and helping them grow globally by being a trusted partner, pioneering, innovating and delivering reliably day in and day out is what it’s all about. The cherry on top is that I get to do this with the most passionate, talented and experienced language technology professionals on the planet. 

With demand for digital content increasing exponentially, everyone is investing in digital transformation. However, a digital-first strategy requires solutions for substantially more content, in more formats, published to more channels. Obviously, this leads to an increase in localization needs, but traditional processes and systems are too time-consuming and don’t scale to meet these needs. Trados offers a more integrated, automated, and holistic approach. You can manage translation for all content types, across all repositories, using any translation method, at a scale unrivalled by other providers. Trados also allows companies to bring together all stakeholders onto a single platform and centrally manage their translation resources. This gives our clients more control over the entire content supply chain, and the ability to accurately plan ahead using rich data reporting resulting in significant savings and faster time to market. 

I love the story about Paula's Choice, a popular skincare eCommerce company. They wanted to rapidly expand their global reach. Time was the most critical factor in their digital transformation requirements, and they quickly identified that translation was a potential road block. We worked closely with them to identify the best solution to meet their needs and wound up deploying Trados Enterprise in just 2 days including an integration to Salesforce Commerce Cloud! Our agile implementation process got them up and running in days where other options would have required weeks or even months. Following that success, they are now translating into more languages and seeing triple-digit growth. You can read more about this story here 

The first major trend I’m seeing is about how language technology is deployed. In recent years we have seen cloud ways of working becoming increasingly popular in the translation industry. For LSPs and corporations, we see an increasing need for collaboration and translation management solutions that are easier to buy, deploy, maintain, and integrate securely. All of which drives those clients toward cloud solutions. We’ve fully embraced cloud as our standard deployment, removing the burden of clients' IT hosting and managing Language Technology. However, we do still offer on-premise deployments when required by some organizations.

 

We also believe that individual translators will continue needing desktop editors for maximum efficiency. Our approach to bridging these two trends is to provide hybrid functionality within Trados Studio. That’s why the latest version of Trados Studio provides essential cloud functionality out of the box. By providing translators with the best of both worlds, and a built-in connection to cloud processing power and the very same platform powering the solutions LSPs and Corporations are using, the entire supply chain is connected and all stakeholder’s benefit.

 

Another trend I’m seeing is around how companies translate content. I mentioned businesses investing in digital transformation earlier, and this requires a shift away from traditional translation processes to become more agile. Companies are evolving their product development, marketing, and client support systems, which reduces content lifecycles. Agile and iterative solutions are being adopted so product content and marketing communications can gain velocity and meet customer expectations. This means content is continually generated in smaller, iterative, continually updated batches that are sent for translation and return at different times. More continuous content creation is a challenge for traditional translation processes and has driven a shift to more dynamic, real-time localization, or, as it is known in the industry – continuous localization.

We recognize the industry fragmentation that exists, not just among service providers, but for language technology as well. The need to bring all stakeholders onto a single platform is more important than ever. It’s the only way our industry will continue to thrive. The exciting thing about the next five years is that we are making large investments in our technology, especially in the development of the Trados portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, we provide solutions for individual translators, LSPs and Corporations, all serviced from a single cloud platform. This means no matter if a project manager works in a TMS, a content requestor submits projects through a portal, or a translator edits content in their CAT tool - all are using the same platform.

 

So, we will be continuing our investments across the board: more AI-driven features, support for new translation processes like continuous localization. But we aren’t stopping there. We’re also extending the platform beyond Trados, through extensive APIs and our AppStore, enabling an ecosystem of partners to extend features and develop from the cloud platform. Our focus on a true ecosystem will not only result in better products, but also put a big dent in solving our industry’s fragmentation.