&

Powering our l10n

journey

General Outline

● Introduction

● Laying the Groundwork

● Solution Overview

● Next Steps

● Lessons Learned

● Q&A

Introduction

● Robert Shaw CLPM℠

○ Content Manager with 17 years experience

○ Localization Institute Certified Localization Project Manager

● OpenTable, Inc.

○ The leading provider of free, real-time online reservations for diners and reservation and

guest management solutions for restaurants.

○ Since its founding in 1998, diners have made over over 1.4 billion online reservations

○ The OpenTable network has more than 43,000 bookable restaurants in more than 20

countries around the world

Laying the Groundwork

○ There was no system in place that integrated the work of translation with the Agile

methodology used by our software engineering teams

○ The choice came down to one of ‘build vs. buy’

● What prompted the investment in translation/Smartling?

○ Prior to selecting Smartling in late 2013, OpenTable had no centralised localisation

management and no concerted translation effort

○ Localisation of its products was done on an ad-hoc basis by employees that spoke the

target language

Laying the Groundwork

● The existing approach to translation (inasmuch as there was one) was

not sustainable

○ Early adopters took to Smartling and helped to push support through

○ When I joined OpenTable, I worked to drive increased adoption of Smartling,

ensuring that we use all the tools at our disposal to the fullest extent possible

Laying the Groundwork

● What role does translation play in OpenTable’s broader business

strategy?

○ There was an understanding that growth would come from new markets

○ However, prior to formalising a localisation process around Smartling, there was nothing

in place to support this

○ The broader business strategy now places localisation at the heart of our efforts to serve

diners who are global travelers, as well as our future expansion plans

Solution Overview

● How did your organization prepare to welcome a new solution?

○ When Smartling was selected, there was some importing of existing assets – but we were

more or less starting from scratch

○ In my 30 months at OpenTable, I have helped to drive more complete usage of the full

feature set that it offers

○ Some companies may have existing translation memories or glossaries of approved

terminology that can be imported into Smartling, but that wasn’t the case at OpenTable

○ Active collaboration of engineering teams only came much later

Solution Overview

● What was your role in preparing the wider team?

○ When I joined OpenTable, Smartling had been implemented around 15 months

previously. However, not all the companies’ software projects were using it, or using it

well, so I describe the past two years as having been a journey towards ‘localisation first’:

■ Building a process that was fit-for-purpose

■ Establishing best practises

■ Changing the make-up of the translation team to drive costs down while maintaining

and even improving quality

■ Recruiting a team of internal reviewers

■ Defining a service level agreement for turnaround time of translations

■ Ensuring consistency with style guides and a glossary

Solution Overview

● Did you face pushback?

○ Although I have overseen the establishment of good process around the supply of visual

context, it was by no means easy and there remain some outliers

Solution Overview

● How did you resolve this?

○ Building the business case for localisation – getting buy-in for the process at a high level

○ Strengthening the understanding that visual context leads to better quality translations,

done faster

○ This in turn has lead to

■ Reduced resistance to doing the work of supplying context

■ Increased cadence at which the work is done

■ Reduced build-up of backlogs (which can foster resistance)

Solution Overview

● How has Smartling’s technology optimised our translation efforts?

○ Our global virtual team of translators and reviewers are based in Dublin, Mexico City,

Montreal, Tokyo ... and Brighton (!)

○ This disparate collection of translation resources is enabled by secure, worldwide access

to the browser-based interface – with no hardware costs and no IT involvement

○ Source updates don’t require the stand down and restart of translation

○ Resources receive automated notifications – and translation and peer review activities

can overlap

○ Centralized, sharable translation memories and glossaries increase translator productivity

as well as delivering cost savings

Solution Overview

● What has changed from a process or results perspective?

○ Smartling has facilitated seamless changes to the makeup of the translation

team

■ New translation vendors have been selected

■ An internal review step was implemented, assuring translation quality

○ Strings are now turned around in only five working days from capture by

Smartling

○ This supports a service level agreement for internal customers of the

translation process

○ 67% of our software projects that use a Github repository connector called

Mercury and receive translations from Smartling every 20 minutes

Next Steps

● How has the company reconciled the future vision and business

objectives with translation efforts?

○ We are now able to roll out new languages with increased ease, as well as realise cost

savings through SmartMatch

○ This could be said to have influenced our decision to aggressively launch new domains

for new markets in 2017

○ I look back on having launched OpenTable in five new languages or language variants in

the space of only a year

Next Steps

● How do you measure the ROI on translation?

○ OpenTable doesn’t yet directly measure the return on investment of the localisation

function

○ However, localising our products supports the provision of our services to diners and

restaurateurs in more than 20 countries

○ Restaurant reservations can be booked in seven languages

○ Translation supports the cross-team, multi-disciplinary effort to achieve the goal

“all restaurants on all domains in all languages”

Next Steps

● What’s next?

○ Smartling is an integral part of an ongoing effort to continuously improve the translation

process and accelerate translation

○ Having launched seven new domains in 2017, 2018 is likely to be a year of consolidation

○ I’d like to investigate machine translation of certain types of content

○ We currently offer on-demand Google Translation of this content, but I’d love to find out

whether a trained custom MT engine could add more value, quality-wise

○ More measurement

■ Reporting more frequently

■ Adding more metrics to existing reports

Lessons Learned

● What advice would you give to a company just getting started?

○ Identify key stakeholders and establish productive relationships with them

○ Meet requirements by establishing and communicating a clear vision and

progressive direction for localisation

○ Build a scalable translation processes, and implement steps that ensure translation

quality

○ Build trust through open and honest communication – set realistic deadlines

○ Demonstrate transparency when proactively resolving any issues that arise

○ Continue to look for opportunities to make efficiencies – experiment with new ideas

and methodologies

Lessons Learned

● If you go back to the beginning, what would you change?

○ Implementing technical solutions to operational issues has been the success story of

2017

○ Mercury, and implementing the context capture feature of the Smartling Mobile SDK for

iOS have enhanced buy-in from technical teams

○ In hindsight I would have sought out opportunities to automate processes sooner

Thanks and Q&A

● Thank You

● Q&A