Locasis

An Orchestra By Any Other Name

Itir Karakasli, Orhan Akbulut and Mehmet Ozgur Caylak, Locasis
Interviewed by Rebecca Ray, Localization Industry Standards Association

The Localization Team at Locasis is extremely proud of the company they have built. The Project Managers make the final hiring decisions, and the team dynamics have been adapted to the dynamic nature of their workflow. This also enables them to integrate themselves seamlessly as part of the product development/delivery teams of their high tech customers. Read on to find out what else makes this Turkish team unique.

Rebecca Ray: What makes you happy to be a member of the Locasis team?
Editor’s Note: The original question was, ‘What do you like best about working for Locasis?’ The Locasis Team decided to rephrase the question to better reflect what they feel about the team and the company they have built.

Locasis Team: To start with, the atmosphere and working environment are very motivating here. The windows of our offices overlook a spectacular spot on the Bosphorus in Istanbul – away from all of the noise and traffic of this huge city, but still close to the city centre and just a few steps away from the water.

Our fast-paced, horizontal management structure is still a bit new for Turkey

We have succeeded in dissolving the traditional hierarchy of a vertical management structure into a horizontal spiral woven from the threads of our mutual understanding and knowledge sharing. We have adapted our team dynamics to the dynamic nature of our workflow, and it works very well.

There is constant motion at the office. Whoever joins our team inevitably keeps pace with us, and their collaborative work eventually becomes their pride and joy – our pride and joy! This is what everyone notices as soon as they walk into our office – this fast-moving, horizontal organization that is still fairly new for Turkish organizations. We have no doubt that this contributes immensely to our recognized ability to integrate ourselves seamlessly as part of the product development/delivery teams of our high tech customers.

Rebecca: How do you integrate new members into your team?

Locasis Team: It goes without saying that linguistic skills (everyone here has at least a minor or major in English, in addition to their other studies), technical qualifications, domain expertise and professional integrity are all a must. But what we are really looking for is harmony in cooperation, a positive attitude, honesty, clarity, self-confidence and the willingness to further contribute to the team’s pleasure in working together. Applicants usually find the harmony and integrity of the team quite appealing.

The final hiring decisions are made by the Project Managers

The final decision about employing an applicant is made by the Project Managers (PMs) and Partner Managers, since they are the ones who will train the new members. We require the new team member to do translation for different PMs in different fields to enable them to experience the various customers, partners, products and issues. This, in turn, enables them to be versatile, which is an indispensable asset for working here at Locasis.

Locasis has a very different internal structure and a new approach apart from the classical one that is often used in Turkey. We are customer satisfaction focused. Naturally, this requires being results and problem solving oriented. Therefore, a Partner Manager's responsibility is not limited to customer relations. Process monitoring, from beginning to end, is a big part of their responsibilities. This means that they do the groundwork to ensure that there are no bottlenecks, informing the customer and the Locasis teams about possible issues that may be encountered and the best options for dealing with them.

Project Managers are responsible for the project itself. Partner Managers are responsible for quality in the broadest sense of the word: quality of the deliverable, quality of the customer relationship, transparency at all levels and proactive communication with the customer at each step.

Rebecca: What’s the most interesting project that you have ever worked on at Locasis?

It was like watching the pieces of a complex and intriguing puzzle come together.

Locasis Team: Definitely, the Cisco projects for their ITE (IT Essentials) and CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) courseware. We had three live courses in our hands, all of which consisted of raw materials to be localized, including Flash files, Photoshop screenshots, headers, footers, buttons, dialogs, glossaries, indices and so on. We had full control over the materials, and as soon as we altered one section of the course or one part of the code, we could display it on our screens. It was like watching the pieces of a complex and intriguing puzzle come together.

Rebecca: What do new customers find different about working with Locasis, as compared to other language service providers?

We adopt the products and services that we localize as our own

Locasis Team: Our customers tell us again and again that we require less support than other service providers because of how easy it is to work with us. This ‘ease-of-use’ is based on our total (and actually rather fanatic) commitment to both our customers and to the Turkish users of their products and services. We pride ourselves (and are willing to take the risk required) to integrate ourselves into the various ecosystems that exist around each one of our customers and partners. We consider it to be our responsibility to enable these ecosystems to expand into the Turkish market and to be successful sooner than they would be without our help.

We define our role in these ecosystems by taking on our customers’ products and services as our own. We have been asked by some of our most longstanding customers why we don’t have more questions about issues like quality levels or terminology or how to solve certain technical problems. We can honestly say that it’s because we approach these challenges as if we had originally developed the product/service, and this often means that the solution is obvious to us.

This partnership model is reflected in our management style, our technical and linguistic capabilities, our meticulous commitment to quality, our on-time deliveries and our cooperative spirit.

We undergo SAP audits every 2 years

We should also point out that the original Locasis team and management were previously part of the internal SAP localization team, and we remain their preferred supplier here in Turkey. As you know, SAP is extremely selective and demanding in terms of its suppliers, with quality being of critical importance to them. In order to meet SAP's extremely high standards, we apply strict processes that all of our other customers benefit from. We undergo detailed SAP audits every two years, and we work closely with SAP Turkey's consultants.

Rebecca: What has been the biggest challenge for you so far, and how did you overcome it?

Locasis IT Project Manager, Mehmet Ozgur Caylak: The biggest challenge for my team so far has been in the networking field for Cisco when we adapted and localized their IT Essentials learning program for the Turkish market (the project that we mentioned earlier). This e-learning courseware for the Cisco Networking Academy included interactive media, quizzes, exams and rich media components. We engaged three IT professionals, along with academics and networking specialists, and we integrated all of their feedback into the final localized product.

Our biggest challenge was that we had to adapt the ‘raw version’ of the courseware provided by Cisco to meet the linguistic, learning and cultural requirements of a young and dynamic target audience here in Turkey. With Cisco's support, we were able to generate an articulate, easily readable and non-repetitive style for the localized version.

Locasis has been recognized by both Cisco and Turkey’s Ministry of National Education

The feedback we received in the end proved that it was an exemplary project based on a number of unique qualities. We are extremely proud of what we did, and both Cisco and Turkey’s Ministry of National Education have recognized Locasis for recreating and adapting these groundbreaking courses for our country’s young people.

Locasis SAP Localization Coordinator, Orhan Akbulut: Locasis is well-known for its ERP expertise. As part of the Hospital and Clinical System localization projects for SAP, the healthcare industry here in Turkey required common terminology to be adopted by state and private hospitals and by pharmacies. However, trying to combine the different usages preferred at the time in each sector was a big challenge for us.

The solution was to sit at a table with experts from all three sectors and to develop a master glossary that would be applicable and acceptable for all healthcare institutions. Under the supervision and validation of experts and consultants who exchanged ideas on the terminology collected by our linguists, we built a glossary which is still used in the healthcare industry today. A wonderful side benefit is that we now have a great network of experts in the life sciences field for terminology and validation issues here in Turkey.

If you can satisfy SAP, you can satisfy everyone else

As part of the localization project for SAP Utilities, we developed new terminology in Turkish to replace the outdated terminology that was in use by the municipalities, but complicated and difficult to understand. This was quite challenging since it covered energy data management, device management, contract billing, invoicing, contract accounts receivable and payable, customer service, work management, and waste and recycling.

For another SAP project involving banking, finance, and banking fund management, we established peer-to-peer communication between enterprise experts, end-users and developers. All of us together then defined a body of accepted terminology as if the software had originally been written in Turkish. We actually still use this particular project and the procedures we implemented as a case study for training our new employees.

Rebecca: What value do you add for your customers?

Locasis Team: We always endeavor to spot problems and to prevent them before they occur or get out of control. At the same time, we keep our customers informed and collaborate with them to develop solutions so that we can save them time and money.

For example, at the end of the Cisco project, we conducted a post-mortem during which we explained the processes we followed, the issues we encountered and the solutions we came up with to resolve them. This enabled Cisco to determine the causes of the issues so that they were able to resolve them for the next project.

For instance, we manually designed HTML glossary files for sections to be listed under the characters unique to the Turkish alphabet for the first project. Cisco resolved the issue on their side which was causing this, so for the second project, we were able to include the special characters in the glossary file itself. This meant that both Locasis and Cisco saved a lot of time and money.

We control the processes so that we control the final quality

One of our other customers – one of the world’s largest and most well-respected computer software companies – recently benefited from our agility as it launched a 1-million word project, involving three product lines. The secret was in the proactivity of our PMs in the areas of (1) translator training (a specific tool was employed for the project), (2) legacy translation cleanup, (3) glossary approval and (4) new terminology sign-off. There were many inconsistent and inaccurate translations in the legacy translations. We informed our partner and were allowed to clean up the legacy translations and prepare a new glossary in collaboration with the partner's reviewer. We insisted that we control all these processes in order to control the final quality, and it paid off for both Locasis and our customer.


Rebecca: How do you manage coordination with other Project Managers?

Locasis Team: When an ERP project involving CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SCM (Supply Chain Management), SRM (Supplier Relationship Management), finance, etc. arrives, it is not efficient for a single PM to manage such a large project. In this case, we immediately form an orchestra, assigning distinct roles to several PMs.

We have a dynamic team. Each one of us strives to become an expert in a second area, in addition to our own specialization. We train our Translators to do the same, so both PMs and Translators are versatile enough to cover more than one area.

In addition, the post-mortem reports are accessible to our whole team through a database. This archived expertise is extremely valuable because it allows us to track what works and what doesn't, so that we don't waste our time or money - nor that of our customers - in reinventing solutions or employing the wrong ones.

Rebecca: How do you build your expertise as a team?

All of our knowledge is stored in a database that is accessible to the whole team

Locasis Team: Learning is an ongoing activity at Locasis. A certain percentage of our projects are new ones which require us to do research or to consult external experts. This knowledge is then added to our database. This intellectual property (IP) that we are constantly creating and archiving allows us to offer cost efficiencies to our customers because it forces us to frequently review our processes (and those of our customers). We then remove the unnecessary ones or create a new one.

A large part of our knowledge and expertise come from multi-language vendors (MLVs) and partners. We attend their kick-off meetings, product promotion meetings and the training opportunities they offer prior to projects. When we have trouble solving a problem, we consult our partner(s) and then store the solution in our database so that everyone on the team will know what to do in the future. During the training sessions before projects begin, we try to cover as many issues as possible, which also contributes to increasing the team's knowledge.

Last, but not least, we also learn a lot from the courses, help files, product documentation and software that we localize.

Rebecca: What will be different about the language services industry in 10 years?

Locasis Team: Machine translation will probably be adopted to a much greater degree by that time for many Indo-European languages demonstrating close affinities in terms of syntax. However, it probably won't be much help for agglutinating Ural-Altaic languages like Turkish.

As new technology and products are being released all the time, localization will always be required for serving new customers. The Turkish market has become gradually more lucrative in recent years for many international companies. As a result of this, several language vendors have started to focus on the Turkish localization industry. From this point on, we will witness some diversification in terms of the language services provided. New services will become available in addition to translation and localization. Even today, we offer added value to our clients outside the usual localization process. We believe that even more services will be offered in the future.

Based in Istanbul, Turkey, Locasis is a team of award-winning experts who are passionate about adapting and high-tech products for the Turkish market.

Itir Karakasli, Partner Manager for Locasis, speaks Turkish, French and English. She completed her undergraduate degree in Sociology. She worked as a patent and trademark attorney for four years. She started to work at Locasis as a Linguist in 2005 after ten years of a freelance translator career. Having been promoted to Project Manager in 2006, she was entitled to the Partner Manager position, in 2007, which she has been working in to date.

Orhan Akbulut, SAP Localization Coordinator for Locasis, speaks Turkish, German and English. He completed his undergraduate education in the Department of Management and Economics and studied German in Germany where he headed for his graduate education. He worked as the Head of FI, CO and Banking systems at the Localization Department of SAP Turkey and moved on to the position of SAP Localization Coordinator at Locasis in 2004. In 2008, he was promoted to the Head of German Department.

Mehmet Ozgur Caylak, Project Manager for Locasis, speaks Turkish, French and English. Having completed his undergraduate education in the Department of Translation & Interpreting, he started to work at Locasis as an intern in 2005. He completed his internship and moved on to the positions of Translator and Linguist respectively. In 2007, he was promoted to Project Manager and also managed the technical staff. He assumed the leadership of Cisco Project Team in 2008.

Rebecca Ray has been a pioneer in managing worldwide product design, localization, marketing and distribution for successful products sold internationally by such companies as BMC Software, IBM, Netscape Communications, Symantec and Sun Microsystems. She is the co-author of the book, Doing Business in the USA: Marketing and Operations Strategies for Success. Rebecca is currently a Consulting Partner and Managing Editor for the Localization Industry Standards Association (www.lisa.org).