Going Pinternational: Bringing Pinterest to 32 languages in under a year
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**DOWNLOAD THE DECK TO SEE PRESENTER NOTES AND TO GET MORE CONTEXT.** (Converting from Keynote to PPT means it's now 50% uglier.) Presented at Confab Europe on Sept. 30, 2014. ---- Localizing your product or website is a huge challenge that can take months and months of time and effort. At Pinterest, localization is especially tough because our business is all about being personal and relevant. People come to Pinterest to discover things that are tailored to their interests, whether that’s motorcycles or DIY party planning. How do you make things personal and relevant on a global scale? I'll talk about how to: -Train remote translators on voice & style while making adjustments for culture. -Create low maintenance processes and documents for localizing content. -Test translation quality among users quickly and effectively. Tools mentioned: Smartling, oDesk, Google Drive
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Going Pinternational: Bringing Pinterest to 32 languages in under a year
- 2. Going Pinternational: Bringing Pinterest to 32 languages in under a year Sadia Latifi, Pinterest pinterest.com/abrelosojos @sadialatifi #confabEU
- 5. Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that helps people find creative ideas for all their projects and interests.
- 6. Source: comscore Feb 2014 Discover Find Pins in feeds, through search and on boards Save Collect Pins on boards, organized by topic Do Try, buy or learn more about your Pins
- 10. A welcoming space to be creative
- 11. We had to speak the local language
- 12. 1. Start from home base
- 13. Know who you are
- 14. Craft your voice Basics Where we stand out Warm | Delightful* Clear | Conversational | Honest
- 15. Clear Conversational Honest Warm Delightful
- 16. Clear Conversational Honest Warm Delightful
- 17. Clear Conversational Honest Warm Delightful
- 18. Clear Conversational Honest Warm Delightful
- 19. Clear Conversational Honest Warm Delightful
- 20. 2. Find your crew
- 22. … Maybe not.
- 23. Get the right people A badass product manager | oDesk for translators
- 24. Use tools that make it easier Smartling to translate | Google Docs for simplicity | Email for updates
- 25. People Tools Product managers + content strategist Project & people management Translator Reviewer 100 translators in 32 languages Google Drive Style guide, glossary, tracking Smartling Translation tool Email Community updates (moderated!)
- 26. 3. Chart your course
- 28. Tier 1 Strong usage: Country manager, community manager, marketing manager Localized blog, social, email Tier 2 Growth potential: Community manager Localize some blog, social, email Tier 3 Smaller communities: Local translators Straight translation, adjusted for tone
- 29. Learn what you can
- 30. 4. Expect some turbulence
- 31. Challenge What if Pin’s a dirty word?
- 33. Challenge What’s delightful to Germans?
- 35. “Exclamation marks can sound like shouting and are often used with children, so use them sparingly.”
- 37. “Germans don’t love things - they find them interesting, curious, useful. They might even like them.”
- 38. “Tone is almost always polite and formal unless it’s targeted for specific users.”
- 39. 5. Reflect on your trip
- 40. Figure out if it’s good What’s a good translation, anyway?
- 41. Survey audience Some survey questions Active Pinners (people who use our service regularly) • How would you describe Pinterest’s personality? • How clear is Pinterest in your language? • How conversational is Pinterest in your language? • How warm is Pinterest in your language? • Would you recommend Pinterest to a friend? Professional linguists (people who are experts at language) • How clear is Pinterest in this language? • Is XX a good word for the English term “Pin?” If not, what would you use? • Does Pinterest seem locally relevant? • Did you spot any spelling or grammatical mistakes? • What else did you notice about our translation?
- 42. Score What it means 1- Pretty bad • Spelling and grammatical mistakes • Inaccurate • Style and glossary inconsistencies • Machine translated • Hard to read • Doesn’t fit in design 2 - Needs work • Inconsistencies, but you can follow along • Some grammatical errors • Some inaccuracies • Some parts don’t fit in design 3 - Launch ready • Free of grammatical & spelling mistakes • Clear, easy-to-understand voice • May lack some personality & local flavor • Fits in design 4 - Pretty good • Free of grammatical & spelling mistakes • Clear, conversational and honest • Friendly but lacks local feel • Fits in design 5 - Excellent • Clear, conversational and honest • Warm & inspiring tone • Authentically captures local spirit • Delights local audiences but stays true to Pinterest brand • Fits in design
- 44. More to figure out A more flexible design | Better ways to give context | How does quality affect growth?
- 45. Growing in 2015 New teams in GER, BRA & ESP | Tackling new languages
- 46. 32 languages in less than a year
- 47. 1. Start from home base 2. Find your crew 3. Chart your course 4. Expect some turbulence 5. Reflect on each trip
Notas do Editor
- Above all else, it’s a place for you to be creative. What we hear from Pinners (what we call our users) is that when they use Pinterest, they experience a state of flow. A moment where they feel in the zone, safe to dream about their future. When do you feel the most creative? What kind of space do you need to be in? It’s important that it’s a welcoming, non-judgmental space with few distractions so you can explore your interests and discover new ones.
- A fundamental part of making this space work is speaking the local language. We have to build a product that people can connect with, no matter where they live. Whether we’re naming product features or sending privacy notices, we need to make sure that we’re relevant everywhere our Pinners are. So how do you go from being a super American, Silicon Valley startup to a globally relevant product in 32 languages? Here are the 5 steps we took.
- It starts at home. Despite my best efforts, you can’t just up and decide to translate your stuff into 32 languages —- unless you can speak 32 languages, in which case, why are you here?
- Before you can begin, you have to understand your own company’s culture and process. We’re a startup, so we have the benefit of moving fast and having a culture that is OK with imperfect things getting published and refined later on. We also have the benefit of having two co-founders, one short and one tall, who care a lot about quality communication. We had support from them to really make this a priority, which meant that everyone who worked at Pinterest knew the same. If you don’t have this kind of culture or support, you might need to rejigger your expectations for how much you can get done at a time. But I’m hoping the processes here can be helpful no matter how big or small your organization is
- Then you need to spend time crafting your voice. The writing team, seen here meeting under a table, first worked on this. It included doing ethnography and interviews with our co-founders, early employees, scoping out competitors, that whole thing. We ultimately decided that being clear, conversational and honest were table stakes for good web writing. But we wanted to stand out with our warmth and where appropriate, delightful.
- Clear is short, active sentences that don’t take a lot of work. This is our in-product education that we show Pinners who haven’t logged in awhile or added any Pins.
- Conversational writing sounds like something you’d say out loud to someone. In our analytics, which can often be a pretty robotic, jargon-filled area, we tried to add helpful, easy-to understand tips. “Here’s a tip - Pin eye-catching images with useful descriptions so people will want to save them for later.”
- Honest is making sure you don’t make overblown promises and stay true to what you’re delivering. It also means you apologize when you make mistakes. In our Acceptable Use policy, we’re honest that there’s a gray area for us when it comes to nudity. Some nudity is OK, some isn’t.
- We’re warm, empathetic and appreciative, always trying to be supportive. Here’s what you see when you log in to our Help Center.
- And delightful, where appropriate. We want to be clever and unexpected in the right moments - not when we’re suspending your account, for example, but maybe when we’re trying to entice you into using a new feature, like our new guided search. So now that you work so hard on your voice, you don’t want it to all go to waste when you translate, right? That’s where the localization work comes in….
- So, you’re going to need some help. You need people support and the right tools to help you translate as fast as possible.
- When we were thinking about who to hire, we first thought about our community. We had been intrigued with crowdsourced translation, which would mean getting our most active Pinners to translate for us for free. We thought it could help us move much faster and more cheaply. When we were expanding to the Nordics, we thought that might be a good test case. We hired a professional reviewer and invited our most active Pinners to translate different parts of the product for us. We added them to a facebook group and gave them access to parts of Smartling. We gave them our voice guidelines and hoped for the best. And here’s how it worked…
- There were lots of debates on words that were hard to control and the quality was inconsistent, leading to a lot of work for our reviewer. We were still able to translate those languages quickly (one language took 2 weeks) but it’s not something we’re jumping to try again. We decided that we really need a more robust team in place.
- First, we hired a localization product manager who was able to stay close to the product and make sure that international was always top of mind while U.S. engineers built new features, etc. Now, about those pesky translations. You can spend lots of money and hire an agency to take care all of your translations for you, and if you have the means and the relationship, I don’t think this is a bad path. But for us, we decided to take extra time to interview and hire individuals so that we could hone in on conversational and warm writing that would have a better chance at local relevance than a vendor in SF. Since we push out a lot of new copy each week, we also thought we could move faster than a process-heavy vendor. We contract a few project manager and more than 100 translators through oDesk, a freelance marketplace. oDesk project managers handle payments, scheduling and questions.
- We also tried to keep it as simple as possible when it came to tools. Smartling is a newer translation tool used by companies like Spotify, Foursquare, and OpenTable. Smartling plugs in to our code and our Drupal websites which means that when an engineer ships code, it goes automatically into Smartling and directly to translators. They’re relatively new and very willing to make changes to their UI to help make things easier. We also stick to Google Docs for a lot of communication and translation, including last minute translations for urgent emails and things outside of Smartling. We also have an email listserv for translators in case we want to provide extra context around copy that has come in.
- So this is the system. Each language has at least one translator and one reviewer. They were found and are contracted through oDesk. We have a product manager at Pinterest dedicated to localization and I, as a content strategist, assist when it comes to training and providing context on the words. We use Google Docs & Spreadsheets for our style guides, our glossary and to track projects. Smartling is the translation tool where most of the work happens and we stick to a (now moderated!) email list to updates to the full team. Localization v. translation
- After you’ve got your team and tools in place, it’s time to figure out what your actual strategy for translation is.
- A big question you might have is — do I customize my content based on location? This is a lot more work but in the name of relevance to your end user, it can be hugely important. We’ve also tried different ways to customize Pinterest based on where you live. On Pinterest you can look at stuff in different categories. In Japan, we added custom categories because of all the niche interests in the country so we expanded the Geek category. It didn’t test as well as we expected. In France, people really appreciated seeing things from other French Pinners, so we changed the product that way. If your audience has different needs for content, you may need to start thinking about grouping and prioritizing different markets.
- Here’s how we think about things at a high level. We have three tiers of markets and we prioritize them by usage and growth potential. Places where we have lots of audience naturally get a greater investment and more localized marketing. Places where we have a small audience get more of a straightforward translation, still with someone located in the region, though. Simply translating the product led to big gains for us in some places. Countries can move up through the tiers, though. You might choose to group by region and assign someone to look after the region and take care of localized content creation and regional needs overall. That’s how GE looked at their corporate side. We look for growth potential since that’s a big focus for us as a startup. Prioritize by a mix of audience and relevance needs.
- At the end of the day, there’s no one size fits all approach to localization, which is esp. true at Pinterest because its individualized to your interests. We do our best with research in markets —- here’s a photo of an at home research trip in France. Learn what you can.
- And in Japanese, we have to toe the line carefully between using a more formal tone, which is expected in JP culture, and trying to stand out as a something different that’s maybe more trendy It’s more important to us to be appropriate than to alienate to en entire demographic. If you’ve got a more specific audience, cater to them. Also want to emphasize, this is just a Google doc. We’re not fancy. When I started, I had come from agency world which meant lots of decks, but there’s not a lot of time for that at Pinterest.
- And after you run through a cycle, it’s important to schedule a regular cadence of reviews.
- After you’ve translated a group, it’s time to go back and see if it’s any good. How do you know if you don’t speak all these languages? Do you just trust the translators? No. It’s important that you have a sense in your own brain about how you’re doing. We decided to create a survey to establish a baseline for how we were doing.
- We’re spending the rest of the year on a major quality audit, which includes surveying translators as well as our most active Pinners to see what they think of our translations. We’re using SurveyMonkey - again, keep it simple - Google Forms are also OK. Here are some the questions we’ll ask.
- Based on the results, we’ll assign the languages a score. Right now, I’m hoping all of our languages at at a 3. That means they are clear, well-translated but may not capture our brand qualities or local flavor. A 5 is where we want all languages to be, but we know that we might not be there yet.
- Know that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. One of our company values is progress, not perfection. It is easy to get upset when you learn the translation in Korean is off tone, but it’s not permanent. It can be fixed. That’s the great thing about writing and content. It can be fixed, made better and hopefully fast enough that you don’t lose too many people along the way.
- There’s still more we have to do. We have to more flexible design for longer languages, more context for translators. And this is the biggest one of all, we have to continue to make the business case for why good content matters. How does translation quality and localization move the needle on growth?
- And in 2015, we’re still planning to grow with new teams in GER and BRA, plus we’ll decide which new languages to tackle
- But we’re super proud of what we’ve accomplished so far…
- Understand what’s possible in your org and craft your voice Get people and tools that make your job easier, not harder Figure out your strategy and bucket like markets with like markets, learn as much as you can Expect that you will not catch every local nuance or sensitivity and recover as fast as possible Take time to learn how you’re doing in each place