In a recent webinar, Lingoport’s Adam Asnes spoke with Luz Pineda, technical project manager of localization at Avigilon, a Motorola Solutions company, about enterprise decision-making and rolling out software for continuous localization. Canada-based Avigilon specializes in AI, video analytics, network video management software and hardware, surveillance cameras, and access control products.
Following the Avigilon localization buyer’s journey
Titled “A Continuous Globalization Buyer’s Journey,” the webinar discussed the ins and outs of one company adopting a new way to do localization. A buyer’s journey is “like a hero’s journey,” said Asnes. “There’s a hero’s journey when you write an epic, and it usually starts with somebody who wants to try things out, has the vision, goes and undertakes this effort, has setbacks, has trials and tribulations, and comes through and is successful in the end.” The continuous localization buyer’s journey needs to take into account things like budget, buy-in, and security. The tech that makes it possible across teams plays an enormous role, ultimately becoming the infrastructure of the localization effort.
When Pineda began at Avigilon, “it was busy but it was manageable, but it has been growing significantly in the past couple of years both organically and through acquisitions,” she said. The company now has geographically dispersed development, more features that need to be delivered faster, and more markets.
A need for automation
“More markets, as you can imagine, it means more locales need to be supported,” said Pineda. In short, Avigilon’s cadence increased as well as its output. They needed to find a way to automate some of their processes, or “we were just not going to be able to keep up with it. It’s not a matter of just throwing bodies at it. You can add more project managers,” but that is not by itself going to solve the problem. “We needed to deliver translations in a timely manner, but we also needed to keep localization affordable… so that’s basically when our quest to find the right type of tools started.”
What did this look like? At first, “we were actually trying to find that tool that you push a button,” and everything would be taken care of, said Pineda. This was not exactly realistic, but “we actually found Lingoport, and Lingoport downloads the translation, which is great, and commits them in the repository directly, which is also huge, because all you have to do in the morning, sit down with your coffee, and just go over the repositories and make sure as to what you need to merge into the target branch.”
Implementing the solution
While implementing the new tool, Pineda and various internal teams at her company had to address security concerns, file format challenges, and more, all while maintaining good relationships with stakeholders such as the engineering team. In the end, however, she says, the situation is good. “The time savings that we’re getting are significant.” Among other things, they’ve eliminated the time spent pre-processing and post-processing each translation request. “We don’t have to wait for all the 23 translators to complete their assignments for us to start merging translations into the target branch. We can just start merging those translations as we get them.”
Overall currently, said Pineda, “we’re making great progress. It has not been easy or problem-free, believe me, but thanks to the excellent support that we have received from you guys and all the teams involved in this effort, I would say that we have onboard over 90% of all the repositories that we need to monitor.”
Making localization affordable and easy as needs increase
Going forward, Pineda says the company’s localization will continue to expand, especially as new acquisitions come into play. This, of course, will raise its own set of challenges. “My main concern is, as we get more products onboarded, and we have to help more development teams, is what exactly are they using? Are they using repositories that we haven’t tested before? We haven’t tried before? I think those are my main concerns, the things that we don’t know, because the things that we have experienced, we know how to fix them.”
The webinar rounded out with a Q&A on specific details such as integration with other localization tools, how translation memory is handled, machine translation concerns, and internationalization.
