F5 is a Welocalize client, and Melinda manages F5’s digital marketing programs across multiple countries and languages. A crucial part of her role involves overseeing translation efforts to ensure seamless global campaigns. To streamline and manage the translation process, Melinda uses Welocalize’s OPAL-Marketing solution, which helps her manage campaigns for global audiences quickly and efficiently.

In the podcast, Melinda discusses her career journey as a marketer, the increasing importance of translation and localization in marketing, and how it has become a core agenda item for marketing teams. They also discuss the role AI is playing in transforming this space and delivering advantages such as expediting the in-country review process and enabling a simple in-context review method for various campaign materials.

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Transcript

Louise Law: Hi listeners and welcome to the Welocalize podcast where we chat about all things relating to global, multilingual content and translation, plus the latest insights into the AI technologies and solutions that are transforming how we deliver fit-for-purpose content.

Today I’m thrilled to be joined by Melinda Hansell from the technology company. F5.

Melinda is the digital marketing director there, and she has over 15 years of experience in global marketing. Melinda, welcome to the Welocalize podcast.

Melinda Hansell: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Louise Law: No problem. Let’s start by giving our listeners a little bit of background into your journey into global marketing. It’s an exciting journey. I’m a global marketer, so I’m intrigued as to how you landed where you are now and give us some insight into how you got involved in marketing translation.

Melinda Hansell: Yes, sure. I started my career on websites, creating websites, more than 25 years ago now. And along the way. I ended up working for a global company and wanted to make sure they had websites in those local languages. And so that’s how I got into translations, and that was that was a little over 15 years ago, I think. And working for that company, we translated our website into 32 languages.

Louise Law: Okay. Wow.

Melinda Hansell: So that was that was my 1st experience with translations and localization, going from one language to 32. So that was like, you know, right into the deep end of the of the translations pool.

Louise Law: Sure.

Melinda Hansell: And so then the more I spoke with colleagues and customers around the world, the more it kind of became a passion for me. And like realizing that good business is all about building relationships and kind of what better way to build a relationship than to speak to people in their language so it kind of grew from there, I guess.

Louise Law: I know. At Welocalize, we work with you, supporting F5 with the OPAL-Marketing solution, to support your global campaigns. Before we get into the details, you mentioned that you work on a lot of website translation. How else do you and F5 work with the marketing campaigns? I know you have a global team, and you’re pushing out rapid campaigns all the time. We marketers we know that speed is always of the essence. If you could give a little bit of insight into the different types of campaigns that that you and your teams are working on.

Melinda Hansell: Yeah. So, while my focus is largely websites, that’s what I spend the majority of my time working on and translating. But also actually across the company – So not just marketing materials – we do this from a marketing perspective – but also what campaigns are running? Where are other places we need to be translating?

We help facilitate translations in our local regions, so that we use a single translation vendor.

Through the [Welocalize] OPAL-Marketing solution, we can leverage translation memory across the company and we help marketing campaigns. We’ve also helped legal teams translate knowledge. All kinds of stuff.

Louise Law: Okay. Also in marketing, we have got so many different file types – videos, text, emails etc.

Melinda Hansell: Yes.

Louise Law: It all needs to be done quickly. I’ve got experience in that area, and I know it can be quite frantic at times.

Melinda Hansell: Yes.

Louise Law: So we both know – that translating marketing materials for global audiences is more than simply just converting text from one language to the other. What does marketing translation and mean to you? And why do you think it’s so important for brands to make sure that this is done properly, especially if they’re operating on a global scale?

Melinda Hansell: It’s about building that relationship and our words, help build those relationships right? And so if we’re speaking and you live and work, and know another culture, another language in another country. And I’m speaking to you like an American – that’s not helping build that relationship right? And so I want to be a company inside that country. I want to be a local company, right? Even though we’re a global company. I want to act and behave as a local company. So, translating and localizing that marketing material. Not that it’s just some English content that we’ve simply translated.

Louise Law: Yes and I mean often with websites and marketing, branded marketing content – it’s the first experience people often make with the company. So you have this small window to make a knockout impression.

Melinda Hansell: Right.

Louise Law: It’s obviously something you feel very passionate about. What are some of the key tips or best practices that you’ve evolved over the years you would offer to other people when it comes to marketing and localization – I welcome the advice 😊

Melinda Hansell: Well, so it’s not a one size-fits all approach. That was one of the first things I learned. You can’t treat one country the same as another. It just doesn’t work. They all have their nuances. All the languages have their nuances.

And so, being flexible in the approach that you take to the translations and a large part of it is building relationships with the local teams, the local marketing teams in-country. So that I can understand or better understand what their needs are, and we can better meet those needs from a translation and localization perspective.

Melinda Hansell: The in-context review has been one of the things that I’ve found. Being able to see the translations and localizations in the way it’s going to sit, whether it’s in a web page or in a brochure, or in any other type of marketing material, in online ads etc, seeing what it’s going to look like rather than just looking at the words that were translated, and then trying to, you know fit the the long German words into the little space, for example.

Louise Law: Yes I know we chatted about this before. Being able to kind of have that visual where this is what the original English looks like, and then directly to have the translated or the localized version next to it. So, you can see how it will actually appear to the user. And that is what we do, with the OPAL-Marketing solution that you guys use – there’s some real benefit to that and we’ve had some great feedback on.

Louise Law: I find it really interesting about in-country review as well, that you mention. Because often the people that know the product, know the solution – they’re people who you want to get their input on the content and get them to review it in the appropriate language – BUT – often it’s not their first job. It’s not their job to review content.

Melinda Hansell: That’s true. Yes, yes.

Louise Law: Sometimes the review process can be painful. You know it’s not the content generation or the creation, or the ideation that is a challenge but getting a slick and accurate review process.

Melinda Hansell: Yeah. And I’ve worked in companies where I’ve had both dedicated reviewers and the reviewers that it’s a part-time, you know, an add on to their full-time job. And if a company can have dedicated reviewers, it’s fabulous. It’s great having somebody who can full-time review content, and you have consistency. You have lots of things that come with that. But that’s often not the case – you have a part of somebody’s job.

One of the things that I’m excited about and looking forward to with and maybe jumping the gun into the AI technology and what technology is bringing us is better leveraging our translation memory and large language models things like that that we can use in place of review or maybe not replace review, but to subsidize the review, I guess.

Louise Law: Pain-free. Make it frictionless.

Melinda Hansell: Yes, help those volunteer reviewers too, get through more content. Faster.

Louise Law: Cool. Well, you’ve just pre-empted my next question, because, of course, we can’t have a conversation without talking about AI. And we love the potential of AI, and also the the benefits that AI and some of the LLMs are delivering right now. And as a marketeer, we know that great use of AI will be beneficial for us to be able to do things faster, cheaper, and quicker.

Louise Law: What does it mean for you? Do you think AI is crucial to the future of marketing, or what areas do you think it is really going to have an impact for you?

Melinda Hansell: I see great potential for AI in a few areas. I think it’s one of those things you have to use with caution and knowledge and understanding. Right? It’s not a be-all end-all. It’s not going to solve all our problems. But I do see it as taking kind of machine translations to the next level, helping to expedite things helping to, you know, like I said in the review process. There is a next level that AI can help with in the translation process and potentially, the in-context review, like being able to create, leveraging AI to create what that looks like. Think there’s potential there. In various areas across the translation process itself.

Louise Law: There’s more to come. Great applications. I know we use it a lot to automate in content creation and translation. It’s just getting better and better.

Do you have members of your team who are dedicated to language and translation? i.e. it resides within the marketing team [which I think is great] and I think that’s probably the right place, moving forward. How do you think that will impact you moving into the future, with the combination of AI?

Melinda Hansell: So my team is largely technical. So we’re more technical marketers versus your traditional marketing. And I think that what AI does is it ends up making us need to be more technical marketers. So that we understand. Because we need to understand the technology. We understand how it works. We don’t need to know how to code and those types of things. But understanding the technology so that you can leverage it in the right way

Louise Law: Yeah, absolutely. You don’t necessarily need to know under the bonnet, so to speak. But you certainly need to know the range of applications it can do.

Louise Law: Do you have any war wounds or battle scars from any marketing campaigns you’ve rolled out relating to translations?

Melinda Hansell: Well, yes, I think everybody does. You know. And my funniest battle scar was years ago when machine translations first started. I had somebody on one of my teams and they found they needed to translate something quickly for the website and found a tool, did the translation, with the free kind of machine translation tool. And the next morning I get a call from it was Russia saying, we have a problem on the website. And it was, it was like a product brief – translating the words ‘product’, ‘brief’. And the machine translation had translated ‘brief’, to ‘panties’ and posted on the website.

Louise Law: Oh, no!

Melinda Hansell: Quickly removed. But yeah, that was that was probably the funniest one. And then I’ve had others where, like, I’ve tried to leverage, you know, kind of machine translation early on things have come a long way, right like it’s a lot better now.

Melinda Hansell: We can like you said earlier. We can translate the words, but it doesn’t convey the right meaning, right?

Louise Law: Yes, sure. Well, that’s great. Melinda. Thank you so much for your time. It’s just been a real pleasure speaking to you, and I really enjoy working with you as well. So thank you again for being a guest on the Welocalize podcast.

Melinda Hansell: Yes, thank, you.

Louise Law: We look forward to continuing the partnership with you.

Melinda Hansell: Thank you for having me.