Make Localization Part of the Experience
Anne-sophie Delafosse Wins the Ninth Process Innovation Challenge
Anne-sophie Delafosse from Deliveroo became the 2020 “Localization Process Innovator of the Year for the USA” at the Ninth PIC which took place January 28, 2021 at LocWorldWide43.
Her innovation “Make Localization Part of the Experience”, explained a dramatic shift to make software localization a key part of the content flow. Designers in Figma create software and don’t need to exit their design environment to manage translated UI. This has brought localization to the center of their experience. As Anne-sophie says, “We are launching into all markets a UI that is better localized because we do it at the design stage and can tell designers what can work and what can’t. This has put localization firmly in the middle of things.”
One of the process dragons, Yuka Nakasone, added that “Anne-sophie really dismantled the product development process and created a new one by placing localization at its center to control everything. Localization teams creating string keys and providing those keys to the dev team is genius. It makes total sense but nobody seemingly thought of it or did it before. And she is clever enough not to automate everything but leave some manual process so there is less friction with the SW engineers. I hope this can inspire many localization professionals to start thinking like Anne-sophie and take initiative to put localization front and center. And it is amazing to see that she managed to do this in such a short period of time. Bravo, Anne-sophie!”
The runner up was Iti Sahai from Procore. She showed how translation was turned into a strategic function through operational efficiencies at each stage of the product development process.
This year’s PIC final round had seven innovators battle on the virtual stage in front of a panel of dragons and the LocWorldWide43 audience. As PIC chair and co-moderator Dave Ruane put it; “We have again smashed the ceiling and the roof with the level of innovation shown. This is the second time we have had both top prizes taken by women innovators and the first time process innovations (rather than technology innovations) have won out. Once again we saw the innovators really grow through the preliminary rounds to the final. The dragons provided great guidance as usual and it was great to see innovators in the final sharing call-outs to fellow innovators. The Spirit of the PIC badge went to Kirill Soloviev. We present this to someone who shows the real innovator spirit and fairness — Kirill took onboard feedback from the last PIC and applied it diligently and eloquently and again had a nice visual show for us. Well done to all innovators who took part in PIC number nine, and congratulations to Anne-sophie and Iti.”
Special thanks to
- PIC dragons: Yuka Nakasone (Intento), Bert Esselink (SDL), Jeff Kiser (Translated)
- PIC advisors: Alex Bernet (LocWorld), Kris Wiegand (LocWorld)
- PIC instigators: Ulrich Henes (LocWorld), Dave Ruane (XTM International)
We also thank LocWorld, XTM International and Multilingual magazine for supporting the event.
The innovators and innovations at the 9th PIC event were:
- Anne-sophie Delafosse – Deliveroo
“Make localisation part of the Experience” - Iti Sahai – Procore
“Global Product Design “ - Kirill Soloviev – ContentQuo
“Ada in action: Augmented Quality Risk Management for PEMT” - Konstantin Savenkov – Intento
“Augmented MT: language- and provider-agnostic fine-tuning of MT output” - Mahmoud Roshdy – Saudisoft
“Time efficiency in the bidi quality assurance process” - Rafał Jaworski – XTM International
“AI-driven Computer-Assisted Review – automatic highlighting of potential translation errors” - Simone Perone – Translated
“AI-assisted subtitles creation process”
Another PIC event is done, congratulations to all finalists and a big thank you to all those who sent in proposals (the highest number of submissions so far). We will try to go bigger again, the next event will be in June 2021, the call for papers will be opened by early March, 2021. Do you have a localization process or technology innovation for the PIC “stage”? Keep an eye out for the call for papers or contact Dave Ruane or Alex Bernet directly.
