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Vidéo Jan 24, 2025

Building Localization Strategies – with Nicole Kittle Broe

Welcome to three Questions with MotionPoint. I'm your host, Dominic Ditherbaid. And today, I have the absolute pleasure of meeting with Nicole Kittlebro, the localization director at Roku.

Nicole, thank you for being here today.

Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me, man.

Of course. The pleasure is all ours. So we'll get right into it, Nicole.

Tell me or tell us, why are you passionate about localization?

What got you into it?

I don’t I don’t think I’m your traditional localization manager, so I’m Mhmm. Tragically monolingual, stateside based, and didn’t come up through, like, a a linguist path.

I'm an operations person, and I met, I was working at a company where, I noticed that we had one person working in localization, and they were really stressed out. And I was like, this this looks like a terrible existence for you, friend. How can I help? And that's really how I got involved. It was really maybe working towards operational operationalizing what this person was doing.

And from there, it became kind of, an obsession of mine to make sure that, the linguists who were doing this amazing work had a seat at the table, which they didn't always. It was more like, well, we finished the thing. Let's throw it over the wall, and then translation team will work on it, and then we'll bring it back. But there were so many missed opportunities for making the product feel like it was really made for other markets, other countries, other folks, than were being seized upon because it was just being seen as that last step in in the journey. And, that wasn't good enough for me, so I felt like those folks deserved deserved more advocacy. And I think probably that's what I love most about the job now is helping people inside products who work in, like, the the corporate entity headquarters realize the value they can get from leveraging the in market linguists in a way they never thought, right, for their actual knowledge versus just their translated words.

Yeah. It sounds like what you're trying to do is marry the talent that you found in in these great localization folks to, to assist them that would probably integrate their skill set to be efficient and and and to work the best it can probably work. I mean, that's something we come across in the industry a lot, which is, you know, people are copy pasting, you know, translations from here to there. And, and, I mean, it comes to a point where that becomes extremely cumbersome.

Right? And it's not an easy thing to do. So it it sounds like you're you delight in creating those operational efficiencies to really let people shine in in what they're passionate about. That in itself, I can see it being a passion for a lot of people.

So sounds like that's where where your bucket is, Nicole. That's that's brilliant.

Yeah.

Well, let's go into the second question, which I guess, really ties into the first, which is how do you scale a localization department? What's the best way to empower a team to scale their processes?

Yeah.

So at every company I’ve been at, there have been hints of, you know, the early days when they were building out the ecosystem because I usually come in when something needs to happen.

I'm not usually there for the building phase. And you'll see they have some, like, internal linguists who are completely overwhelmed and can't handle the volume or sometimes they're sitting around going, I don't have much to do.

And so, really, scaling is only achieved by externalizing your support. Right? So every company I go to, I just make sure to to do that pretty much right away to find the right partner to make sure that we can expand the contract to meet the localization needs of the organization, be it testing or be it actual translation or, you know, at cultural advocacy.

We just need a a robust bench at our vendor that we can turn to and say, hey, we need to do this volume or this volume this week. Mhmm. They'll be just be able to handle it whatever it is.

Yeah. So so you kinda come in when, you know, they they started turning the wheels and then, your your job is to, you know, make it scalable. Right? Which is to the problem that a lot of people face, doing doing translation.

And I think it's it's, in many ways, like, kind of interesting. I I don't know if I would say ironic, but, you're trying to serve a lot of markets, and sometimes marketers or product managers are trying to do that. If they're working for a headquartered company in the United States, might not speak those languages, but they have to scale those processes. n'est-ce pas ?

And and it's hard for them to, do that without the experience of both the technology and, you know, the cultural, multiculturalism and and multilingual, you know, facets that they that they bring? How do you scale that using technology?

And you're highlighting something that's very interesting, which is a lot of people think about translation and are very focused on the art piece of it. But in this digital world, like, it's really marrying that art with the proper enabling technologies to, you know, marry up build that at scale.

Mhmm. I think one of the other things I really focus on is that it's a it's a deal breaker for me. Every product team that I work with, I insist that they enable localization, CICD, continuous integration, continuous delivery. No annual inclusion of translation ever.

I don't wanna touch it. I don't wanna move the file from here to there. I don't want my engineers to move the file from here to there. It just needs to flow in a continuous loop, and, and that's the the way we can do more products.

Right? Because otherwise, I just have to keep adding headcount to my team, and I internally look at the corporate entity, and I can't always get headcount. Right? So everything needs to flow through the tools, through the pipeline, through the system without manual integration.

And then the other thing we try to do is try to make sure the right information gets to the right person without someone having, on my team, having to touch it or manually route it. Could be a bug that's been filed. That could be a request for translation. Again, we just built we focus on building these robust pipelines by which if my marketing then my marketing team wants to make a translation request, right now they just send an email and it creates a ticket, and that's received by my vendor. My vendor receives it, and then they just reply back, and I don't have to touch it. So we call that exception based, intervention. Like, we only wanna get involved when it's an exception or there's a problem escalation.

So that’s how we scale the process.

That's a very tight system, and it's harder it's it's easy to say, and you described it beautifully, much harder to do, right, and implement that. And I think that's very true. In our experience at Ocean Point, we understand the fact that at the beginning, people might hire a freelancer or an LSP and then get these files and copy paste and send the files they wanna translate and get them back. But sometimes, the localization work that needs to be done has nothing to do with translating a word.

It actually has to do with, a misalignment on the website on the translated version. Right? Like, now there's spillage over the CTA because there's the word growth from English to other languages. Now it's not the user interface is not really looking the way it should.

That has nothing to do with either a marketer or a translator. That's actually a web developer. Right? Or a little bit more of a technical, a persona that has to go in and and manually fix that up.

So, efficiency and who has to touch what and when is much easier said than done. But an extremely important part of an efficient and scalable process that's that's that's you're bringing great light to that.

Well, you’re bringing you’re bringing up a really good point about, like, a shift left methodology, which we also employ.

So for things like truncation, you know, certain languages needing fifty percent more space, forty percent more space Yep.

We swim upstream to try to get ahead of those issues. So for our designers, we insist that they, employ a pseudo localization step or pseudo translation step at a hundred and fifty percent expansion, right, on their designs. Are you gonna okay. Every bucket, every bug.

Right? I wanna try to get ahead of and truncation, let's be honest, probably one of the most common bugs that you see in UI Yeah. When you do testing. So anything you can do to get ahead of that is really beneficial.

We also, you know, like, consider using, like, linter scripts to scrub and find concatenations, things like that that can cause inflation issues down the line. Really wanna use tech to prevent early on. The the I think they said something. There's, like, a whole saying about the a bug is fixed fastest when it's fixed close to development or or something of that sort.

But the closer you are to the actual creation of the thing that has the bug, that's when you stand the best chance of fixing it, not when you're testing QA or testing localization at the end of the process, typically, because they're like, well, I'm sorry. I've worked. My team's already moved on to something else.

The development team’s already moved on to something else.

n'est-ce pas ?

So you have to solve it at the inception or prevent it through using some of these tools that can give you these insights early on that you might have an issue down the road.

Brilliant explanation, Nicole. And I I mean, I'm a marketer and a salesperson, and I think of it also as an objection. The best way to get ahead of an objection is not when it comes to you, but mentioning it before, right, and addressing it before. And in our industry, we like calling that in many cases internationalization, right, where we actually create and build a product that is built for when a language is gonna be incorporated, whether it's gonna be down the line or if it's gonna be immediately.

It's already readily adapted for when that's gonna happen, and that's a great way to do it. I'm starting to think, Nicole, they should bring you before they scale just because of what you just said. Right? But that's brilliant.

Brilliant. Well, thank you very much, Nicole. I'll move to the next question.

I mean, we the our our our viewers haven't haven't known this, so maybe they do, but, you also were leading the localization department at Snapchat before you were at Roku, you know, vastly different in terms of platforms and user bases. So I'm curious to understand or or to to ask you what localization challenges did you find to be consistent between the two worlds, you know, and was there anything that you did to navigate, those those consistencies, specific to each company?

I think that every company I’ve been at, the consistent theme is always that you have to change how people think about making a global product because your most every company that I’ve walked into has started in the States, right, with US and English and maybe or maybe didn’t expect to expand to other countries and other markets.

So everything they built works for US for English. And so I'm constantly saying, like, there is no such thing as this is for US only. There is no such thing as this is English only. It's actually more accurate to say, because sometimes we will ship a feature that's just for the states.

But there's no such thing as English only because language doesn't stop at the border, and you can change your UI to any language no matter where you are. Right? So if you change it to German, for example, and we've only localized some of the features into German, now your experience is half in English and half in German, that's not acceptable. So changing that culture that's been built up over, you know, ten years, fifteen years, however the company has been a lot around to make folks rethink about what it looks like to build their product and not just with US, but for the global market and for folks who don't speak English, that's the thing that's been common at every single company.

It's this concept that we have and and then to follow suit on that is we have to shift left in the development process as a localization team, as a cultural advocacy team to be like, hey. If you build it like that, it won't work in my market, and here's why. Yeah. And and that's really hard to get into some of those rooms because, again, those product teams, those engineering teams, the development teams are tightly knit groups that are trying to fail fast forward or produce quickly.

And if they let you in, they're like, are you gonna slow us down? n'est-ce pas ?

Yeah.

They don’t they wanna shift.

They have deadlines. They need to make the things happen.

And so really advocating again for these experiences around the world or for experience in other languages, that seems to be the the change that I always need to make at every company.

Well, that that makes total sense. And I was just thinking while you were saying that how it it it you you probably have to find yourself saying something similar like, this is actually more fast because if if I come down in three months and ask you hey we built this wrong now you have three other sprints that are like set up and you have to go back to something you did four months ago and the people are like I don't even remember what I was doing four months ago you know and and that starts happening. So and and you know what? And it's it's a it's a beautiful thing, this globalization and how technology has, you know, really really made other people, other languages just had a click of a button accessible from wherever you are.

In the mind of, you know, u US based companies that are growing so fast because the people managing these processes that we spoke about at the beginning, you know, might only know English. And it's almost like they it's not that they don't have the empathy. It's that they're just, a little bit, you know, ignorance is bliss type of a thing. Well, then they're just not considering it because we're so focused on our flagship market that it's it becomes like an, a little bit of an afterthought.

And it's all it's not it's not a lack of capacity for empathy. It's more of so, like, we have to make sure that we're bringing this conversation to the table right away. And, that that's almost like a a little bit of a lobbyist job. n'est-ce pas ?

And I feel like, Nicole, you're doing technology stuff, scaling processes, and then you're also making sure that all these other consumers and customers in different markets have a seat at the table vicariously through what you're saying. And that's, I mean, honorable thing. I think that's a very good point as well.

Nice.

Yeah. Absolutely, Nicole. Well, do you have any closing remarks or thoughts you would like to share with the audience?

No. I I think it's just for anyone who might be watching that is in the same kind of position and role, it's really common to find yourself in this role out of necessity, in companies that haven't really hit the scaling phase yet. And, it's really important to take the time to advocate for what you need so that you don't find yourself in a position where you're just a go between moving requests between the requester and and the folks that can deliver what you need. I see that so often when I walk in so many of the companies that when I join, that's where they are.

It's a frantic team trying to deliver as many requests translation requests as possible. And, you really have to do the groundwork and develop the pipeline such that you you aren't living in a tactical world, forever and ever. Right? So Yeah.

Don’t forget to advocate for yourself so that then you can turn on your heel and start advocating for your linguists and other markets and the experiences that users and other markets deserve.

That that's a great point, Nicole. Thank you for sharing. It's almost it it makes me think about, you know, I I run the marketing department here at Ocean Point, and sometimes I look back and we did all of these great things. And we have and and it's my job to make sure I bring it to our CEO and say, look.

Evan, this is all the stuff that we've accomplished, and this is the impact it's made so that we understand that all these things that we've done, now how are they tying into growing the business. Right? So I would add that to what you just said, which is, you know, every now and then look back at what you've done and bring it back to the table and say, look, because we did it this way, this is the impact we're having. And then it's less of a, you know, you're not you're not you're not getting in the way, but you're showing the value that this new paved direction has been able to bring the company.

And now you're much more appreciated, because at the beginning, it's not that you're not, but it's it's maybe, like, we were saying before, they're focused on the flagship market or something else to ship fast. Right? But, like, no. Actually, this actually created a big impact on our company.

And I think, it delighted a lot of customers, and that’s that’s very that’s very cool.

Yeah.

Awesome. Alright, Nicole. That does it for three questions with MotionPoint. Thank you so much for being here.

We hope to have you here again. And until next time, we'll meet again. Bye. Bye, everybody.