There are lots of service-based businesses throughout the world that struggled to adapt online working models during the pandemic. One of these industries is translation and localization.
Many incumbent players within the industry struggled to increase their revenues online based on Slator’s 2020 industry report. This was attributed mainly to the slowdown in enterprise demand. With the ever-increasing speed of globalization, cross-border e-commerce became a hot topic for many businesses. The currency fluctuations throughout the world and the gig economy becoming a hot topic for many people that want to work from home triggered more needs for localization.
Various online service marketplace platforms invested heavily into their geographic expansion efforts with the changing behavior of demand from the online space. Let’s face it, things will not ever go back fully to “offline” again even after the pandemic now. Many industries such as the event industry, already accepted this fact and shifted their focus to less costly and more scalable online event solutions. The translation service industry is one that had many incumbents that struggled to shift their online workstyle. With most players focused on servicing enterprise segment customers, when the enterprise world slowed down their investments, the service providers also struggled with them during the pandemic. Many traditional sales teams also did shrink in size. This was mainly attributed to dependencies caused by in-person meetings requiring inefficient sales methods.
Online translation moderated marketplace platform Protranslate’s co-founder and CEO Kerem Kalkanci states “Inefficiencies in the translation service industry motivated us to provide a leaner approach 5 years ago. As former IT industry veterans that have consulted for Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies for many years, we were inspired to create a responsive platform that could provide a wide range of services in numerous language pairs regardless of customer’s location, eliminating the in-person meetings and offline workflows. Our platform today is capable of serving thousands of customers every month without human intervention from our end” Protranslate’s platform combines advanced marketplace features with robotic process automation (RPA) steps baked into the workflows required by the translation industry.
With a holistic and opportunity-obsessed approach, online translation service startups like Protranslate are addressing the translation industry with an “online-only” business model. While the online marketplace approach has shown its challenges for various incumbents that forcefully diversified into other language and AI areas later on, with a “moderated marketplace” vision integrated with enterprise account management features it will be interesting to observe how startups like Protranslate will get a response from large enterprises after the Pandemic goes away in various parts of the world.