Argos’ Takeaways from LocWorld47 Berlin

We would be remiss to not attend LocWorld47 Berlin, the most respected conference for all things localization. This conference is the first actual face-to-face event after more than two years. The organizers did a fantastic job and we’re still processing our thoughts, and the energy from the event will keep us going for some time. In the meantime, here are some observations and takeaways made by some of the Argos attendees at the event:

Robert Brodowicz – Product Owner

“To me, it seemed like there is a certain shift happening – most booths at the conference were tech companies offering solutions often with some AI feature as a differentiator. It made me happy; when I first suggested internally that we start applying AI to different products years ago, I had a gut feeling that this is the trend of the future for LSPs, and it might very well be the case.

Regarding the keynote presentation and the women in localization panel: both expanded on the idea of work-life balance post-covid and in general. The former introduced a notion of work-life blending caused by us working from home mostly. One interesting observation the speaker made is that, in the work-from-home era, making meetings is so easy, that it’s hard to find ‘deep focus time’ – a period in a day when you work for x hours uninterrupted. I’m still pondering on this and will try to examine my team in terms of whether some people are participating in too many calls even without really noticing.”

Stephanie Harris – Global Marketing Director

“Machine translation still seems to be one of the top topics of interest to translation and localization buyers. Most people are using MT somehow, but they want to improve their processes.

International copywriting and SEO are up and coming. Many of the people I talked with had gaps in their systems in regard to ISEO and were excited to learn that we offer help not just on the keyword research side but on the strategy side as well.”

Rodrigo Zeferino de Azevedo Cristina – Enterprise Sales Director

“During the event I felt an overwhelming sense of community that many of us thought would be forever lost. There were an incredible number of fresh faces that came with new ideas and different ways of looking at the industry, processes, customers, and vendors.”

Antoine Rey – SVP of Customer Development

“I moderated some panels on Monday at the pre-conference workshops and was impressed by the people we had on the panel from Qualtrics, Shopify, Dell, Asics, Meta, and memoQ, all working on ensuring they are providing value to their organization. The main success factor across the board seems to be figuring out how localization services can contribute to stakeholders’ OKRs.

As it happens, I have proposed a panel for LocWorld San Jose in November about that subject, “Unlimited Localization by OKRs!”, with Meta, Zendesk, Atlassian and Salesforce.com! We also had a very well-attended panel with Oleksandr Pysaryuk from Shopify and Alex Coope from ServiceNow and discussed the intricacies of platform localization and how it is different from regular product localization.

Great to see everyone in person again after 2.5 years of absence!”

Kim Shouler – Business Development Director

“First and foremost, I’d say that it was just so wonderful to be back in the same room as so many inspirational people from our fantastic industry, many of whom I had only ever met before over Zoom! There were so many interesting conversations, fascinating sessions, and it was a pleasure to have people stop by our booth for a chat.

Regarding the sessions, I very much enjoyed hearing from companies at very different stages of their localization journey, and how they are meeting the associated challenges. Bea Verdasco and Zeynep Yeğiner gave a very entertaining session on how they are building the foundations of their localization ‘castle’ at Trendyol, and Gary Lefman gave a fascinating insight into how they are managing large-scale continuous localization at Cisco. The fact that the sessions covered so many different stages of a company’s localization journey, meant that every attendee was left with some valuable takeaways.”

Libor Safar – VP Growth

“The community spirit is one of the things I love about the localization industry. Energizing.  

If anybody needed a reminder localization is becoming more technical, most of the exhibitors were either language tech companies or those heavily invested in tech; few pure-play LSPs.

There was general optimism palpable in the industry – no mention of the R&D words (recession, downturn). Plenty of conversations and presentations about scaling up, growth, copying with volume, etc.

Most innovation in the industry continues to be incremental. Several interesting ideas were discussed (content quality improvement via AI, MT efficiency and speed of deployment, audio/video localization improvement, etc.).”

Véronique Özkaya – CEO

“LocWorld Berlin was a clear example that sharing knowledge makes us better professionals. The event was choker-full of insightful presentations and allowed for great networking. It was energizing to meet so many clients and industry colleagues in person!

We’re already looking forward to the next event later this year. Will we see you there?