M+E Daily

Despite challenges, this is the best time to be in the localisation industry and everybody in the sector should be excited about the next five years, according to Mark Howorth, CEO of VSI.

Among the challenges today: Customers want lower prices, higher quality and faster turnarounds. Talent, translators and project managers are in short supply and seek higher wages. Nobody knows if the streaming boom is over or whether localisation growth will continue. Esoteric terms including artificial intelligence (AI), voice synthesis, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and ChatGPT have become incorporated into everyday conversations. All the vendors are building new capacity also.

Those challenges might scare most normal people away from the localisation sector. But Howorth, ex-CEO of SDI Media and president of Iyuno-SDI, has returned to the localisation industry as VSI’s CEO.

“It’s a strange thing to be called an industry veteran because I still consider myself  a rookie in this industry relative to almost everybody in this room, he said during the closing keynote session “Running Back into the Fire – Why would someone return to the Localisation Industry now?” at the Innovation and Transformation Summit (ITS): Localisation event in London on Feb. 28.

After all, he said: “You guys have been doing this for your whole lives, and I’ve only been doing it for about six or seven years. But it is an honour.”

Pointing to recent headlines that included cutbacks at Disney and Netflix, he said: “All of a sudden, what was a big expansion” of streaming services is “now [slowing] down.” But, in 2023, “I go jumping back” into localisation, he said.

“There are other things that make us nervous about the localisation industry broadly defined” also, he told attendees.

But he added: “Let’s remember. It’s not just that our customers are starting to think about localisation with a little bit of a finer eye on do we just localise everything or do we not? But remember, our customers are going through, as we’ve heard earlier today, a whole bunch of consolidation. And when they have consolidation, they have synergies and synergies means cost reductions. And cost reductions means that [they’ve] got to find money somewhere. And, all of a sudden, localisation, which used to be this thing that nobody knew about, is now a big number.”

There were people in the room working for companies making $200 million- $400 million a year on localisation, and “I’m not even counting media services,” he said, pointing to the “bigwigs, particularly in Los Angeles, [who] are saying, ‘how do I make that number go down?’”

One way they achieve that is by telling vendors –  a lot of the people in this room – ‘You’ve got to drop your prices,’” he said. “But you don’t just have to drop your prices. You have to drop your prices and you have to go faster because, as we all talked about before, they’re starting to think that there’s a magic localisation button that you just hit.”

So, he added: “You’ve got pressure on the prices, you’ve got more demands coming from your customer. The customers themselves  are thinking about whether or not they should even be localising…. The reality is that right now we’re in an industry where we’ve got the blind talking to the blind. You’ve got the customer calling up your localisation vendor, saying, ‘Hey, I need to get this done.’ And then the person on the other end of the phone may or may not know what questions to ask, and it’s a surprise that we get anything done.”

So, why is he returning to this industry now? “Well, there’s a lot of reasons.,” he said “The first one is that, despite what we read in the headlines, our business is going  to continue to grow. Localisation is going to continue to grow…. We’ve got a lot of non-English content that is now being shared across the world. That’s good. Even if people are slowing down the rate of localisation, it’s going to continue to grow,” he predicted.

The Innovation and Transformation Summit: Localisation was sponsored by AppTek, Signiant, EIDR, Iyuno, LinQ Media Group, Vubiquity, OOONA, XL8, and Collot Baca, and was produced by MESA, in association with the Content Localisation Council.