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When global messaging and local language converge · Two in Twenty

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Two and Twenty News Podcast Ring Team at White Marble Consulting.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Kirsten Leasting, Head of Content at White Marble.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: In each episode, I will be joined by two industry experts with the lid on investment marketing issues, challenges, and industry trends.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Joining me in this episode, I'm Cordelia Hughes, Regional Vice President of Financial and Legal at RWS Group, and the Langloser, Marketing Consultant at White Marble.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Over the next 20 or so minutes, we will delve into the topic of content, specifically the challenges facing the financial services industry when it comes to delivering regulatory compliant content in multiple languages, the rise of AI and ensuring accessibility.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Cordelia and I work with RWS.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: RWS is one of the world's largest language service providers.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: We provide language technology and services to a really large number of global corporations, primarily big tech, life sciences, and finance and legal.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: So on any given day, our teams might be helping companies with interpreting assignments.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: We might be working on a large campaign in multiple languages.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: We may be helping a large pharmaceutical company to prepare the materials in different languages for filing for a new drug submission, or indeed producing fund content for regulatory submissions, as you as you mentioned.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm in the finance group.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: So we focus on large financial institutions and within that, chiefly asset management, where we have been supporting our clients for gosh over two decades.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: So there we will be helping distributors produce all sorts of language content.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: So anything from digital and marketing and sales and pitch books to regulatory submissions.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we in Britain and the US arguably do tend to get a bit spoiled because so much content globally is available in English, or the default is that it is in English.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that there is a general lack of awareness about just how much translation companies actually need if they want to expand or operate internationally?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we have worked with clients, as I say, for about 20 years, and some of our long-standing clients are well used to the challenges that they face in that regard.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: And some of our newer engagements start with typical complaints.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: So what we often tend to hear is our translation sounds like Google Translate.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: We would translate way more content if it wasn't so problematic, so expensive.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: We outsource our translations to translation companies so that we don't have to review it.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: And yet we have to review it.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: And our salespeople aren't translators, they don't have the time to do it, and so on and so forth.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: Those are the complaints that we hear all the time.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure, Lauren, that's sadly not unfamiliar to you either.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: No, I've been on the other side of the fence where kind of managing a European and a global team in-house, those were the exact same challenges that we had in-house and kind of difficult for local language marketers to manage that as well as their existing workloads.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then you had a breadth of preference around global companies like yours, who are a bit more holistic and can work across languages, and then it's one agency that we're dealing with and they kind of doing everything for us, or your bespoke agencies in each region.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And again, there's kind of regional preferences, there's personal preferences around that.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but certainly all of those challenges resonate.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: They feel very true to what kind of in-house marketers are experiencing as well.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it's it's tricky.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, I have to say, I should say that it's really easy and that there's a golden solution, but actually there isn't.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: There is no one solution.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but there are many ways that we would advise our clients when they come to us with those kind of problems.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: That there are many things that can help.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, it's still a human business.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: So where you have a level of diversion of opinion or creativity, which is part of the translation process, you'll have a difference of opinion.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that's just one aspect of it.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: But we would typically look at advising clients to have a content audit.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: So to look at, I mean, as as we've both touched on, these problems come when people are well down the process.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: So we would always say, you know, start somewhat from the beginning.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: You've probably done a lot of good work, but have a think about auditing your content.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: So, what is your content?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: Where are you producing it?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you need to?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: Could it be done by a human, or could indeed some element of machine or AI help with a heavy lifting?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: Who are the linguists?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Let's have a look at style, let's have a look at preference, who's reviewing the content?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: I actually think that's probably one of the most fraught elements.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: So let's agree that someone's in control, and once you've got your house style and terminology sorted, let's limit the scope for debate about the quality and preference issues because that could just go on forever.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: And the more people that will review something, the more opinion there will be about it.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then the source, you know, why are you producing it for that market in the first place?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: And was it suitable?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: So elements of transcreation can come in there.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: It might sometimes be better to write it in the initial language, though there are scale issues with that.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Most people tend with scale to want to translate.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's tech.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: And tech can be really, really helpful in terms of organizing, coordinating, centralizing for quality and control purposes.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: But before that point, you need to get the fundamentals in order first, I think.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: So very often those things have just been overlooked because businesses grown and markets have grown, and the translation always comes last.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: So that's probably how that happens.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: I would even um maybe take a step back from that and look more broadly at what your goals around localization of content are.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: What is your strategy for European markets?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: We see this, and we're starting to see this a lot more through some of the big US players that we work with.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's fair to say there's a slight kind of lack of understanding of just how much resource, effort, energy is required to produce content or translate and leverage content outside of the US or outside of the English language into those various regions.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: So thinking, again, going back to your points around that kind of global expansion, what that looks like for you as a business, if that is a priority, then it's a big kind of question that needs to be answered around translations because it's important in those European markets to show your commitment into those markets as well.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where translating relevant content plays a fairly big role.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: So looking at that kind of broader localization strategy.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of those things that you've talked about are the elements that need to be put in place in order to kind of deliver on that on that localization piece.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: The further back you can go down that process, the better the result will be.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: What are you trying to do why actually it can do more harm than good if you don't do it properly?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there are so many studies now that will demonstrate that producing content in the language of the person who is receiving it is going to be more effective.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: And everyone's pretty much sold on that, particularly in the marketing arena.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: But if it's going to be very difficult, it certainly is off-putting.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then of course, you know, if you're thinking about our industry and the nuance around language and technology, uh, terminology, and having that kind of bedded into the way in which you communicate with your clients to ensure that it resonates and it does go back into that commitment piece.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Are you committed to the Italian market, the Spanish market, the French market?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: It requires a quality control and a really kind of high level of quality for the language and the translations that are going out into that market.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's, I guess, slightly nuanced within our industry in terms of, and this is where it becomes slightly challenging, I think, for in-house marketing teams because it's resource constraint internally and especially on the local language speakers within those teams.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because they're running a marketing strategy, they are looking at activation into those markets, and then they're also having to review translations, kind of decide on what content is leveraged and what goes out into that market, and then applying that quality overlay in terms of the review.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it does become, I guess, quite difficult then for CMOs and marketing teams from a resource perspective, looking at how that's stretched and whether or not you've got the right support coming in.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is slightly to your point where you touched on technology earlier.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: There are more and more platforms that are now kind of helping that process that is starting to make that a little bit easier.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I remember a few years ago now we were looking at bringing in a consolidation tool to help with our European translations, to build a bank or a library essentially of translations that we could pull on for various forms of content.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I was chatting to a peer at Allianz who had had that bedded in.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of thought to myself, wow, they've got it waxed.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like they've got the central suppository, all their translated contents, it's their various languages.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: If they're wanting to build a faction, they just pull the various paragraphs or, you know, the various kind of bits of text into a template, and then that spits it out on the other end.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, that's possible for those types of documents, but more and more where we're building our marketing and promotional strategies around content and sort leadership, it's not a one-size-fits-all.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where that the pressure comes in, I guess, on some of those technology platforms that are helping to solve some of those challenges.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the technology is only part of the puzzle.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the technology is only as good as the people that use it and only as good as what goes into it.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: So when you have a central repository or a translation management system, a TMS as we would call it, if the content that's in there isn't any good, that's sort of useless.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: So they can be brilliant if they're well used.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: The idea and the concept that you would put everything into one place for reuse and leverage for cost purposes and consistency purposes is a really good one.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: But getting the good quality content in there in the first place is the key.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: And that can be either that you select good linguists working within the system who understand the system, or that you start more and more to think about AI and machine translation, which is the game changer in our industry as much as it is in all industries.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: And you've heard it talked about a lot in asset management, and lots of our clients are coming to talk to us about it as well, and whether it's a threat or whether it's a positive thing.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody is an expert.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think there are a lot of punters out there, and everyone has an opinion.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm far from being an expert, and I actually am concerned about it in the same way that everybody else is.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: But whenever people say, well, the machines will make, will take away the heavy lifting and there will be more creative work for people, jobs won't be gone, they'll just be different, and all of those things, I kind of my gut reaction is to question it.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, I have to say, from what we've seen in our industry, looking at it from a translation perspective, most of those things appear to be true.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: So when we think about translation being something that everyone wants to do and think about the challenges that you've mentioned, actually I think AI and MT could really help because it takes away a lot of the heavy lifting, it makes it less arduous, less expensive.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: So actually, translators are more and more becoming editors of machine translated content, which means that the heavy volume work that they have to do to get to the fun bit is taken away by the machine.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then the tweaking and the creativity is where the human element really comes in, that we see happening more and more.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: It means that it's less expensive for our clients because there's more and more content that's required to be produced with ESG reporting and what have you.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: That can all be done, a lot of it by machine.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think it is more creative.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think the role is changing.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And also, I'm slightly comforted by the fact that when you think about training large language models, which is part of the AI exercise, which many of our clients are looking at, you have teams of people taking biases out of those models, taking male biases out.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so when for me it was very much a question of ignorance, of something I simply didn't know about.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: But the more I learn about what can be done and what some of our AI teams are doing, I actually have more faith and trust in it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: So perhaps in answer to the marketing uh head of marketing that I spoke to who said it's just a pain in the neck, I actually think machine might really help with that in terms of getting a lot of good tested material into a system.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, making sure that the regulatory terminology is correct.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: That can be quite tedious, but machines can do that part of it.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe it will create more scope and more fun within it.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: Who knows?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad you touched on the AI bit because, like you, it's an area I certainly don't feel like I'm an expert on either, and we're all learning, but we are thinking as an agency as as well.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get on top of this for our clients?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a big topic for them.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's talking about it.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: How do we navigate it?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: What will the impact be over time?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly, yes, I think in your world it there will be a big impact as as there will be for ours and our clients.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we were um chatting to a CMO yesterday.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: We do an annual CMO research paper, and it's one of the questions that came up, and and it wasn't even a topic last this time last year, when we were running the survey and asking, you know, the CMOs a series of questions, and and it's a big topic now, and he's very supportive and he's encouraging his team to kind of use it as much as possible, understand it, in experiment with it in your kind of day-to-day job.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, there is a regulatory layer that needs to be applied and reviewed and kind of validated alongside that, as opposed to just taking whatever is spat out as gospel.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: But it's interesting to see how these mind shifts, mindsets are shifting.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess it is all part of how we need to kind of constantly adapt within the industry and various kind of you know, new initiatives and new ideas and new technology that's being thrown at us constantly.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think there are still lots and lots of questions around it that it needs that you know security is one of those.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, some of our asset management clients have embraced it, but it to the extent they've started to build it in-house rather than using public models, because actually you don't know where content comes from, where it's stored and where it's going.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then the question of accessibility, which is a big part of our work, an increasingly talked-about element of our work, if you need to make accessible cont content accessible for, then it will be hard without the the use of the machine.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: We've been speaking a lot more about that recently with European asset management clients, where previously it was a question that mainly came from the US because the US appeared to be well ahead of the game with the accessibility, uh the ADA act that they have.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: So now with the FCA's consumer duty, lots of our clients have said, um, just as you help us make content accessible in a different language, how about you know, braille, text, speech to text, audio?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: We can't only have content available for one sector of society.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's going to become much more to the fore.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's always been doable.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you know, braille has happily been around for decades, centuries.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: But many of those things at scale would not be possible without AI.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a really happy part of it.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: And if you think about the framework of ESG, people worry overly, well, rightly heavily about the environmental part, but the social part, accessibility is part of that.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing we've seen is, and again, this was through the report that we ran with CMOs last year, is that some groups are actually looking at, or some already have in place, a dedicated translations manager who effectively acts as a traffic manager for translations.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: So they manage the internal team and their needs around content that needs to be translated, and then they manage the external agencies as well.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is that something you see quite a lot, or is that quite common?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: More and more, actually.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I I I think from a provider point of view, it's really helpful and a really good idea.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it you can really understand how this would come about.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: When companies first decide to launch products in different markets, they do it in a disconnected way or have done traditionally.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: And very often you'll have different teams focusing on different markets, or even if you have the same team focusing on all markets, there'll be a split, let's say, between the regulatory and compliance work that gets done by the sort of product and legal teams, and then the work that gets done in the marketing arena.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: But from a translation provider perspective, actually, if that's coordinated in one place, it's much more effective because there's quite a lot of content overlap between those two teams.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: There are some content that only belongs to each, but in the middle, there's quite a lot of overlap.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: We've seen that particularly with SFDR and ESG, for example.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: So SFDR content has to appear in a prospectus, but also a report, perhaps a fact sheet, a monthly commentary, and on the web with the web disclosures.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: And quite often the web piece has been in the domain of marketing and the prospectus in the domain of product and legal.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: But the content is the same in all of the languages.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a question of who oversees all of this and who owns it, and where are the decisions made, and who has the ultimate say about the review of it, going back to that, because review of content and backwardsing and forward sing can be so time-consuming and expensive.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: So if someone says, actually, you reviewed this once, we agree that the terminology was this, it is this, it's done.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm, you know, that's that.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's actually really helpful.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's helpful to have everything in one place, limit the opinion, yeah, from a provider.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: And manage the whole briefing and all of that kind of thing.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: I I think we as a provider would be really in favour of having ownership in that regard.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's actually really important.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's a blend of both.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: There are some types of content that are much more homogenous and are much more suitable for being centralized, and the source gets signed off by one person at HQ and then it's translated.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that's much more the case with regulatory content, of course, and that sort of thing, where it has to stick very closely to the original.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: Others are much more successful when there's a degree of flexibility because it isn't just about very, very carefully and successfully translating something.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's about thinking how does that audience think in the first place?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: And there are huge cultural differences when it comes to that.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: So there is certainly a case for creating content in its original language by at source, uh, on the transcreation side of things.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, that's not at all scalable when it comes to having to produce a lot of messaging, you know, at high volume that needs to be, you know, then then translation is a better thing.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: But it's much more successful.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, financial service languages is tricky, right?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Because the regulator says it has to be translated in exactly a certain way.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: And we've had examples of that where our linguists will come back and say, right, the regulations say this, and the regulatory terminology means we have to follow it to the letter.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: But when I translate this particular paragraph in French, it's actually completely wrong and makes no sense.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so there sometimes we've had our clients say, Yeah, totally see that.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'm actually also my French myself, and it's right, it's completely incorrect.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: But the regulator says that, so let's do that.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's kind of craziness, but we've also seen that, and gradually then things will get improved and changed.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: One website project we worked on for a large asset management client.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: We said, Look, you know, how about we blend, sticking very closely to the regulatory terminology for disclaimers, uh, obvious um terms to do with investment objectives and all of that kind of thing.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: But then where we see that there's more of a marketing, a freer, more creatively expressed type of content, we transcreate that.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then we actually they were adamant that it had to not be that, that they would prefer it to be to sound less natural in the target language and to adhere to the regulations than for it to sound natural in the target language.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: Which then generated a whole conversation around surely if it's well expressed and people understand it better, the regulator would be happier because the consumer is being spoken to in their own terms, in a jargon-free way.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: That was about five years ago.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought about that with the FCA consumer duty regulation that has now come out in the UK.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, I think that probably we've moved more in that direction.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Someone doesn't understand it, even if it's correct from a legal perspective, it's not particularly an effective outcome.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think what the FCA is saying to people is you have to speak to people in a jargon-free way.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: Not everyone will understand regulatory terminology.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that's part of the reason why people don't invest in financial products because they don't understand them.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that's another challenge.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: So we think it's possible actually that the what the FCA has done here might end up being adopted in other countries.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so you'll have an element of plain language in different languages, which is yet another thing that we might have to think about.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that brings us to the end of this episode.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: My thanks to Cordelia and Lauren for sharing their insights and expertise.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you have any questions about translation, content, accessibility, or any other topic in this podcast, please do get in touch using the contact details in the description.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can subscribe to this podcast through Apple, Google, and Spotify.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: If there are any topics for investment marketers you would like to and twenty to cover, please do get in touch.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can also find episodes from our earlier podcast, Aim High, on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening until next time.