Description
Co-founder of Translated, Isabelle Andrieu, shares the unconventional journey of building one of the world’s top translation companies—from hacking early SEO with the Simpson or celebrities content, to launching an AI-powered SaaS tool, and branding through a global sailing regatta. A powerful story of resilience, creativity, and believing in humans in the age of AI.
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
It's a beautiful story about resilience, about mounting a project that is so far away from what you traditionally would have done, that has brought us a lot of branding.
Welcome to Marketing, the podcast that helps you boost your digital marketing strategy with LinkedIn and with a bit of French accent. I'm François, Client Solutions Manager.
And I'm Aurélie, Account Director at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Our purpose is to initiate discussions around digital marketing, B2B, and LinkedIn to help you align your marketing strategy to your business goals and your audience's needs.
We will be joined by special guests, experts, clients to inspire you, inform you, and help you innovate. So grab pen and paper and let's get started.
Pen and paper? François, we're not in the 80s anymore.
Oh yeah, you're right. Well, open chat GPT, ask for a summary of this podcast, and let's get started anyway. Hello and welcome to this new episode of Marketing. I hope you're doing very well. We are surely doing well. And I'm, of course, with Aurélie. Hi, Aurélie, how are you?
Hey, François. I'm doing fine. I'm still very high in energy after our Be To Believe event two weeks ago. It was such a wonderful event where we had the chance to discuss the importance of the buyer group, the importance of influencer marketing and of vertical videos on LinkedIn. And where we had the chance to meet with Isabelle Andrieux, co-founder and chairwoman at Translated. Hello, Isabelle.
Hi. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me.
It's our pleasure to have you. It's really great that you're here in this episode because you have a lot to share about mostly brand and strategies and all this. And I'm sure that's going to be very interesting. But first, can you please start by introducing yourself and telling us a bit more about you?
Yes, sure. So my name is Isabelle. I'm French. as you can say by the name. And I co-founded my company back then in 1999 with my husband, Marco, when I was 22 years old. So we basically launched the first internet-based translation service called Translated. And today it's one of the largest translation companies. And the characteristics of the company is that we combine great human professional translators with AI. With our full-stack technology that we've built over the years, so we have 200 highly qualified professionals based in Rome with a pool of half a million professional translators. And we serve B2C, B2B, and large corporates, such as Airbnb, Uber, and NVIDIA. So I ended up playing different roles, starting being a translator myself. project manager, an account, chief operating officer. And today I'm also the chairwoman of the company. And I have still a very active role as I am head of people management. So HR department, but we call it people tower. So I take care of culture, training, hiring the best talents.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Isabelle, for this presentation and all those elements. and you talk about Translated being an old company, let's say, like a company with a lot of experience. And that's a great point because I wanted to go back to the creation of Translated and how you managed to get your name known in the translation space. When preparing the episode, you told me that you started to invest in brand really just four or five years ago. And as you say, Translated is now around 20 years, which means that during 15 years, You did without doing brand on purpose. That's something you told me. And my question is like, how did you do that? What strategies did you use to emerge without this big focus on brand? Yeah, you told me you even managed to have the most visited webpage in Italy. I'm sure many of our auditors would love to know how you did that and how this worked for you.
I think first thing first, it's really important to understand that there's a substantial difference between what people want and what people need. So when we started Translated back in 1999, nobody was really looking for an internet-based translation company. So we bought the domain name for $100. We were ready to go. I was fresh from the university. with a lot of ideas to create my company. Imagine two young adults, fresh, knowing nothing about branding and marketing, but really willing to create a translation business. So at that time, it was the beginning of the Internet. And we understood that this was an opportunity and it would have definitely changed the market landscape forever. But nobody wanted translations online. Instead, we saw that everyone was interested in downloading MP3 or sending text messages via the Internet, knowing information about the Simpsons or even Pamela Anderson. So this is exactly what we did. Before social media existed, we created content on the web about all these topics to allow search engines to find those contents. And on these pages, on this content, we were explaining to the people what translation was. and why it was possible to translate now online. And most importantly, we would advertise our translation service. So we literally put a translated banner on that pages. So we gave people what they wanted. They wanted to know about The Simpsons and Pamela Anderson. And at the same time, we would educate them to what was possible now and better for them. So translate their content. So instead of a standard translation company, they would now have the possibility to go for an online translation quotation and an online translation company. So this was not the most efficient way to do it. And we realized that over the years. But this worked perfectly well. And the page that we made became the most visited web pages in Italy with 30 million. unique visitors online per month and in 1999 i can tell you it was a lot and um but guess how many people who are searching for pamela anderson are interested in professional translations very few yeah maybe not that many not that many so that was uh good for the branding so people get to know new stuff but the conversion rate was extremely limited. This was a strategy that allowed people to discover something new, new ways of translating. So by leveraging trending topics to attract users and introduce the concept of online translation.
That's what you call real marketing, Isabelle. And also... One of the major challenges that you had is that in your market, you had huge competitors, right? Who had a huge visibility. How did you try to emerge in this niche market? What were other strategies that you used in order to emerge in this very competitive market? Apart from Pamela Anderson and the Simpsons, were there other tactics, other strategies that you leveraged?
Yes. So today, some companies think that Translated is a big company and that we are a very influential translation company in the language scape. And others can view us as a small 200 companies located in Italy. And we're actually beating with the Googles, the Microsofts, and the OpenAI for the best technology. It's not, there's no... Not easy. Not easy. But there are also a lot of other transition companies, more than 600,000, that have zero technology and do not know anything about AI. So everything is relative. So what I can tell you is that it was not easy to compete with the big brands like Google. It's not easy because there's something that is called dilution. And for instance, if you take Google. It does many things. And when you think about Google, can you think about Google identifying it as a translation company? I do not think so. Not really. Not really, exactly. So you trust Google for many, many things. It's obvious that they offer a translation company. But they lose a little bit of focus when it comes to the niche of translation. So having focus is very important. and doing something well allows you to have a competitive advantage that allows you also to move in the space with lots of agility and therefore express your full potential. So now in terms of strategy and visibility, we've pointed everything on digital marketing, as I mentioned before. acquisition strategy with very specific targets where we can measure very well what we're doing. And we were able to reach types of markets that were relevant at a global scale. And today, there are media that support this strategy better than Google. Google AdWords, for instance, is making us lose a bit of control while other platforms such as Microsoft and LinkedIn in in particular. support advertisers like us very well in terms of targeting and analytics. So competing as a smaller company in a niche market against giants with enormous visibility and budget constraints is undeniably challenging, but it also represents unique opportunities that play to our strengths.
Yeah, when you manage to have this focus and execute well, I guess. And also, I like what you said about when you started, you were creating content. So you already had a content strategy, even though you were creating content on other things to attract like traffic and all this. But it was already in this idea of creating content. One of the strategies you adopted that was quite recently, and I would like to talk about that, to go really bold with a regatta. and I would love that you help us understand yeah, a bit more what's this project about? How did it came? What it was exactly? And what did you achieve with it? You told us that the return on investment was huge. So I would love to hear more about that and hear how this is balancing with your digital marketing strategy that you just discussed before.
Yeah, this sounds, it's a crazy project, basically.
It sounds like this, yes.
It is absolutely crazy. so we were in search with a new way to promote our service and to position ourselves. And because Translator does a lot of technology, but we have this beautiful combination between humans and machines, our motto is we believe in humans because we've always put humans at the center, at the core of what we're doing. We do not use technology against humans, but we enhance human skills with technology. So we believe in humans is our motto. And back then... Three and a half years ago, after COVID, we were literally going out with my family for a short vacation. The only thing that you could do was sailing at sea. That was the only thing that you could allow yourself to do. And my husband, who suffers normally from severe seasickness, was fine after three days. And I had removed the sailing option in my brain because I knew that my husband was really sick. But something happened. He started falling in love with sailing and starting searching for a boat to buy. And people tried to convince him that that was the worst thing to do because you are happy when you buy the boat and when you sell the boat. And in the middle, it's a lot of money. But anyway, we were in Tuscany in the villa that we use for creativity that we share with among our team and there's a beautiful window there where we could see sailing boats passing. So that started populating our minds and we thought that, I mean, we liked the idea of sailing anyway. When he searched for the boat, Google advertisement started doing the rest because we started receiving lots of advertisement for boats. And one in particular was the regatta, the 50th anniversary of the Whitbread Round World, a very famous regatta, one of the most adventurous regatta, that for the 50th anniversary would allow boats from 15 years ago to sail around the world in four steps. without technology. And that immediately resonated in our brains. How could a technological company start a project so ambitious without any knowledge of sailing, surrounding themselves by people who knew a little bit more about sailing than us, and telling about the story? So that's what we did. We bought the boat. We surrounded ourselves with the best professionals, selected 1,500 but people around the world to join us in this amazing adventure. actually did the ourselves so we we had many many people uh responding to our call professionals and non-professionals and the the project went on in september 2023 we so it's a it's an it's a it's a tremendous story we actually became uh first uh on the first leg first on the second leg We were about to be first on the third as well, but we broke the boat, we recovered and then back on track for the fourth leg. We were also about to win the fourth leg and then we broke the skull again, but we finished the race. It's a beautiful story about resilience, about mounting a project that is so far away from what you traditionally would have done that has brought us a lot of branding. a lot of fans that were following the project. And whenever you come to the table with a big client and tell about the story, it makes a difference knowing that the two co-founders and also part of the team has done a regatta that is so adventurous. It can tell a lot about the people you are in front of and that allow themselves to think big. And to not be afraid and not be scared of bigger things.
And just a quick question. How did your position translated into this? Was it like branding on the boat? Or how did you use that? Maybe did you have some, created some content that you pushed online or something like this?
Yes, absolutely. So the boat was branded. So the We Believe in Humans was written on the side of the boat. We had actually two boats, one that we prepared for the regatta that would sail around the world in four steps, four legs, and another boat that we strategically bought and put in San Francisco Bay Area, where we mostly have our clients. And we would invite potential prospects, potential clients to sail with us over the weekend with a superstar of the sailing environment that is called Paul Cagliard. a sailor who has won several times the America's Cup. And with Paul Cahill being very well known in the U.S. ecosystem, would train the people over the weekend, and they would either decide to sail with us for the project or just have fun. And this ended up with more than 700 people who got trained on Saturdays and Sundays. for more than two years. And it opened so many doors for us because when it comes to doing something else than business, you get to know very well the people and you start having meaningful conversations with everyone. So it's a powerful connection with potential prospects. So that's what we did. So two boats, one in San Francisco and the other one for De Regata.
Beautiful story. Yeah. Thank you, Isabelle. Really nice story. And I love the Creativity Villa in Tuscany. I wonder if we're going to be invited someday.
Yeah, the Villa in Tuscany is a villa that we bought for the 20th anniversary of the company. And we thought that it was... So, first of all, because as a community, you know, when you're a founder, you want to create impact. And impact is something that I... I really like as a keyword. So creating impact is also how do you behave with your community? What can you create? It's about having responsibility for whatever you're doing as an entrepreneur, you know. And so we bought this villa because none of us by themselves would have afforded such a villa in Tuscany, in a very beautiful area where you can see the sea, the mountains. It's beautiful. And we gave it back to our community. So we go there for off-sites. We share the villa among our employees. If they are in the company for more than four years, they have coins that they can use the villa for themselves and their family to rest. And it's also beautiful for them to go with their team members and think about the future. You know, we have to pause in a... non-common location where you're not used to to go and reflect on how can you prepare for the for the for the next thing you know for the next big scene
You get creative ideas and marketing ideas also. So for the listeners of this episode, if you want to get the best strategies in marketing, you need to have a place like that, I guess.
I love the concepts. And is that as well, Isabelle, is that where you decided to launch your first SaaS product?
Actually, yes. Actually, yes. So we...
GVTV. Thank you.
Yeah, we recently launched Lara. It's a powerful translator, universal translator. That's what we want to call it, universal translator. It's a tool that allows you to translate with the best technology. It's a combination of machine translation and large language models. We know a lot, we hear a lot about large language models, but it's a combination of... machine translation that is more, sticks more to the context and to the original text, but a little bit more of creativity with large language models and allows, does not allow too many hallucinations, you know?
Do you call them hallucinations, really?
Yes, that's what it's called. When it makes a mistake? Yes, it makes mistakes and it creates something that you haven't heard. asked for that's uh that's what it is it is about hallucinations yes so Lara is very revolutionary in our market especially I mean the language market is completely in a revolution right now and it's state-of-the-art so we have this language technology that also is critical of itself so it's adaptive it adapts to the context to And it learns from your past translations. So the more you translate, the more it learns from your style. And it is also critical from what it is, the output. So whenever it lacks context, it tells you, oh, I need a little bit of context translated in that way. So it's very interesting. And singularity in language is pretty near. singularity is the moment when the technology will be able to produce a result that is similar to the best translators out there. So we are pretty near to that. And with Lara, we think that we can reach the top 2% of our professional translators' quality in the very near months. So it's really amazing. and the API will be...
Sarah-Isabelle, how do you switch or shift your communication now that you have this Lara product, now that you're in SaaS? Is there any change that goes with it?
It's all a work in progress, so I cannot tell you. So we are all in this dynamic where we are thinking strategically how we are going to position ourselves. It's very overwhelming. because we've been in this industry as a service company for 25 years. Now we are adding a SaaS product to the market and it's something that is really new. So we are, again, surrounding ourselves with people that have done it before. And now as a consumer product, you have to end up with strategies that are maybe a little bit different from what you've done before. So... it opens lots of possibilities also here. For instance, starting with the local market, we have pretty soon the Jubileo in Rome that is starting in a couple of days. It's about having pilgrims coming in the eternal city of Rome. How can you take advantage of all that crowd that do not speak Italian? So how can you position all product there? There's an old discussion about how can we do that because it was just launched a few weeks ago and the Jubilair is starting pretty soon in 10 days. So yeah, we're all in. I wouldn't say in an emergency, but in a phase where we're strategically building new communication plans. And I can tell more in the next episode, maybe.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And just to stay on the topic of AI, because I think that's in the core of what you're doing now in the industry. We hear a lot in the marketing side that AI will take marketers' jobs. And I think it's also a big concern for the translation industry. And you told us during the preparation call and also right now that human is and will always be in the heart of the industry. I think it's the same for marketing. Can you maybe develop a bit on this aspect of how we humans work with AI and the way AI can help humans but not replace them? Because I think what you will see in translation is... very applicable to marketing too.
Yes, sure. So AI's role in industries like marketing and translation isn't about replacing humans, but it's about complementing and amplifying their abilities. AI excels at automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as data analysis, trend forecast, or creating initial draft of content or translations. but handling this task, it frees humans to focus on the aspect that requires creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking. For example, in marketing, AI can analyze customer behavior and suggest targeted campaigns, but it is the marketer who crafts the message in a way that resonates emotionally with the audience. Similarly, in translation, AI can produce a basic draft, but human translators ensure cultural sensitivity, tone, nuance, and accurately, they are accurately conveyed with the humans. So the real strength lies in collaboration to me. So AI and humans together are far more powerful than either alone. So AI brings efficiency and scalability and the ability to handle massive volume of work while humans provide the empathy, the cultural insight and the creative spark that machines cannot replicate.
Provided that they have a creativity villa in Tuscany.
Exactly.
Thank you so much,
Sabine. That's a good news. We won't be replaced yet by AI, but we will work and collaborate with AI to get even more great things done. Thanks a lot for this way of opening our discussion and for everything you shared in the discussion. Thanks a lot for your time. It was great having you on the podcast.
It was a pleasure, Isabelle. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much.
Thank you, and have a good day.
Bye. Bye. Thanks for
Description
Co-founder of Translated, Isabelle Andrieu, shares the unconventional journey of building one of the world’s top translation companies—from hacking early SEO with the Simpson or celebrities content, to launching an AI-powered SaaS tool, and branding through a global sailing regatta. A powerful story of resilience, creativity, and believing in humans in the age of AI.
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
It's a beautiful story about resilience, about mounting a project that is so far away from what you traditionally would have done, that has brought us a lot of branding.
Welcome to Marketing, the podcast that helps you boost your digital marketing strategy with LinkedIn and with a bit of French accent. I'm François, Client Solutions Manager.
And I'm Aurélie, Account Director at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Our purpose is to initiate discussions around digital marketing, B2B, and LinkedIn to help you align your marketing strategy to your business goals and your audience's needs.
We will be joined by special guests, experts, clients to inspire you, inform you, and help you innovate. So grab pen and paper and let's get started.
Pen and paper? François, we're not in the 80s anymore.
Oh yeah, you're right. Well, open chat GPT, ask for a summary of this podcast, and let's get started anyway. Hello and welcome to this new episode of Marketing. I hope you're doing very well. We are surely doing well. And I'm, of course, with Aurélie. Hi, Aurélie, how are you?
Hey, François. I'm doing fine. I'm still very high in energy after our Be To Believe event two weeks ago. It was such a wonderful event where we had the chance to discuss the importance of the buyer group, the importance of influencer marketing and of vertical videos on LinkedIn. And where we had the chance to meet with Isabelle Andrieux, co-founder and chairwoman at Translated. Hello, Isabelle.
Hi. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me.
It's our pleasure to have you. It's really great that you're here in this episode because you have a lot to share about mostly brand and strategies and all this. And I'm sure that's going to be very interesting. But first, can you please start by introducing yourself and telling us a bit more about you?
Yes, sure. So my name is Isabelle. I'm French. as you can say by the name. And I co-founded my company back then in 1999 with my husband, Marco, when I was 22 years old. So we basically launched the first internet-based translation service called Translated. And today it's one of the largest translation companies. And the characteristics of the company is that we combine great human professional translators with AI. With our full-stack technology that we've built over the years, so we have 200 highly qualified professionals based in Rome with a pool of half a million professional translators. And we serve B2C, B2B, and large corporates, such as Airbnb, Uber, and NVIDIA. So I ended up playing different roles, starting being a translator myself. project manager, an account, chief operating officer. And today I'm also the chairwoman of the company. And I have still a very active role as I am head of people management. So HR department, but we call it people tower. So I take care of culture, training, hiring the best talents.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Isabelle, for this presentation and all those elements. and you talk about Translated being an old company, let's say, like a company with a lot of experience. And that's a great point because I wanted to go back to the creation of Translated and how you managed to get your name known in the translation space. When preparing the episode, you told me that you started to invest in brand really just four or five years ago. And as you say, Translated is now around 20 years, which means that during 15 years, You did without doing brand on purpose. That's something you told me. And my question is like, how did you do that? What strategies did you use to emerge without this big focus on brand? Yeah, you told me you even managed to have the most visited webpage in Italy. I'm sure many of our auditors would love to know how you did that and how this worked for you.
I think first thing first, it's really important to understand that there's a substantial difference between what people want and what people need. So when we started Translated back in 1999, nobody was really looking for an internet-based translation company. So we bought the domain name for $100. We were ready to go. I was fresh from the university. with a lot of ideas to create my company. Imagine two young adults, fresh, knowing nothing about branding and marketing, but really willing to create a translation business. So at that time, it was the beginning of the Internet. And we understood that this was an opportunity and it would have definitely changed the market landscape forever. But nobody wanted translations online. Instead, we saw that everyone was interested in downloading MP3 or sending text messages via the Internet, knowing information about the Simpsons or even Pamela Anderson. So this is exactly what we did. Before social media existed, we created content on the web about all these topics to allow search engines to find those contents. And on these pages, on this content, we were explaining to the people what translation was. and why it was possible to translate now online. And most importantly, we would advertise our translation service. So we literally put a translated banner on that pages. So we gave people what they wanted. They wanted to know about The Simpsons and Pamela Anderson. And at the same time, we would educate them to what was possible now and better for them. So translate their content. So instead of a standard translation company, they would now have the possibility to go for an online translation quotation and an online translation company. So this was not the most efficient way to do it. And we realized that over the years. But this worked perfectly well. And the page that we made became the most visited web pages in Italy with 30 million. unique visitors online per month and in 1999 i can tell you it was a lot and um but guess how many people who are searching for pamela anderson are interested in professional translations very few yeah maybe not that many not that many so that was uh good for the branding so people get to know new stuff but the conversion rate was extremely limited. This was a strategy that allowed people to discover something new, new ways of translating. So by leveraging trending topics to attract users and introduce the concept of online translation.
That's what you call real marketing, Isabelle. And also... One of the major challenges that you had is that in your market, you had huge competitors, right? Who had a huge visibility. How did you try to emerge in this niche market? What were other strategies that you used in order to emerge in this very competitive market? Apart from Pamela Anderson and the Simpsons, were there other tactics, other strategies that you leveraged?
Yes. So today, some companies think that Translated is a big company and that we are a very influential translation company in the language scape. And others can view us as a small 200 companies located in Italy. And we're actually beating with the Googles, the Microsofts, and the OpenAI for the best technology. It's not, there's no... Not easy. Not easy. But there are also a lot of other transition companies, more than 600,000, that have zero technology and do not know anything about AI. So everything is relative. So what I can tell you is that it was not easy to compete with the big brands like Google. It's not easy because there's something that is called dilution. And for instance, if you take Google. It does many things. And when you think about Google, can you think about Google identifying it as a translation company? I do not think so. Not really. Not really, exactly. So you trust Google for many, many things. It's obvious that they offer a translation company. But they lose a little bit of focus when it comes to the niche of translation. So having focus is very important. and doing something well allows you to have a competitive advantage that allows you also to move in the space with lots of agility and therefore express your full potential. So now in terms of strategy and visibility, we've pointed everything on digital marketing, as I mentioned before. acquisition strategy with very specific targets where we can measure very well what we're doing. And we were able to reach types of markets that were relevant at a global scale. And today, there are media that support this strategy better than Google. Google AdWords, for instance, is making us lose a bit of control while other platforms such as Microsoft and LinkedIn in in particular. support advertisers like us very well in terms of targeting and analytics. So competing as a smaller company in a niche market against giants with enormous visibility and budget constraints is undeniably challenging, but it also represents unique opportunities that play to our strengths.
Yeah, when you manage to have this focus and execute well, I guess. And also, I like what you said about when you started, you were creating content. So you already had a content strategy, even though you were creating content on other things to attract like traffic and all this. But it was already in this idea of creating content. One of the strategies you adopted that was quite recently, and I would like to talk about that, to go really bold with a regatta. and I would love that you help us understand yeah, a bit more what's this project about? How did it came? What it was exactly? And what did you achieve with it? You told us that the return on investment was huge. So I would love to hear more about that and hear how this is balancing with your digital marketing strategy that you just discussed before.
Yeah, this sounds, it's a crazy project, basically.
It sounds like this, yes.
It is absolutely crazy. so we were in search with a new way to promote our service and to position ourselves. And because Translator does a lot of technology, but we have this beautiful combination between humans and machines, our motto is we believe in humans because we've always put humans at the center, at the core of what we're doing. We do not use technology against humans, but we enhance human skills with technology. So we believe in humans is our motto. And back then... Three and a half years ago, after COVID, we were literally going out with my family for a short vacation. The only thing that you could do was sailing at sea. That was the only thing that you could allow yourself to do. And my husband, who suffers normally from severe seasickness, was fine after three days. And I had removed the sailing option in my brain because I knew that my husband was really sick. But something happened. He started falling in love with sailing and starting searching for a boat to buy. And people tried to convince him that that was the worst thing to do because you are happy when you buy the boat and when you sell the boat. And in the middle, it's a lot of money. But anyway, we were in Tuscany in the villa that we use for creativity that we share with among our team and there's a beautiful window there where we could see sailing boats passing. So that started populating our minds and we thought that, I mean, we liked the idea of sailing anyway. When he searched for the boat, Google advertisement started doing the rest because we started receiving lots of advertisement for boats. And one in particular was the regatta, the 50th anniversary of the Whitbread Round World, a very famous regatta, one of the most adventurous regatta, that for the 50th anniversary would allow boats from 15 years ago to sail around the world in four steps. without technology. And that immediately resonated in our brains. How could a technological company start a project so ambitious without any knowledge of sailing, surrounding themselves by people who knew a little bit more about sailing than us, and telling about the story? So that's what we did. We bought the boat. We surrounded ourselves with the best professionals, selected 1,500 but people around the world to join us in this amazing adventure. actually did the ourselves so we we had many many people uh responding to our call professionals and non-professionals and the the project went on in september 2023 we so it's a it's an it's a it's a tremendous story we actually became uh first uh on the first leg first on the second leg We were about to be first on the third as well, but we broke the boat, we recovered and then back on track for the fourth leg. We were also about to win the fourth leg and then we broke the skull again, but we finished the race. It's a beautiful story about resilience, about mounting a project that is so far away from what you traditionally would have done that has brought us a lot of branding. a lot of fans that were following the project. And whenever you come to the table with a big client and tell about the story, it makes a difference knowing that the two co-founders and also part of the team has done a regatta that is so adventurous. It can tell a lot about the people you are in front of and that allow themselves to think big. And to not be afraid and not be scared of bigger things.
And just a quick question. How did your position translated into this? Was it like branding on the boat? Or how did you use that? Maybe did you have some, created some content that you pushed online or something like this?
Yes, absolutely. So the boat was branded. So the We Believe in Humans was written on the side of the boat. We had actually two boats, one that we prepared for the regatta that would sail around the world in four steps, four legs, and another boat that we strategically bought and put in San Francisco Bay Area, where we mostly have our clients. And we would invite potential prospects, potential clients to sail with us over the weekend with a superstar of the sailing environment that is called Paul Cagliard. a sailor who has won several times the America's Cup. And with Paul Cahill being very well known in the U.S. ecosystem, would train the people over the weekend, and they would either decide to sail with us for the project or just have fun. And this ended up with more than 700 people who got trained on Saturdays and Sundays. for more than two years. And it opened so many doors for us because when it comes to doing something else than business, you get to know very well the people and you start having meaningful conversations with everyone. So it's a powerful connection with potential prospects. So that's what we did. So two boats, one in San Francisco and the other one for De Regata.
Beautiful story. Yeah. Thank you, Isabelle. Really nice story. And I love the Creativity Villa in Tuscany. I wonder if we're going to be invited someday.
Yeah, the Villa in Tuscany is a villa that we bought for the 20th anniversary of the company. And we thought that it was... So, first of all, because as a community, you know, when you're a founder, you want to create impact. And impact is something that I... I really like as a keyword. So creating impact is also how do you behave with your community? What can you create? It's about having responsibility for whatever you're doing as an entrepreneur, you know. And so we bought this villa because none of us by themselves would have afforded such a villa in Tuscany, in a very beautiful area where you can see the sea, the mountains. It's beautiful. And we gave it back to our community. So we go there for off-sites. We share the villa among our employees. If they are in the company for more than four years, they have coins that they can use the villa for themselves and their family to rest. And it's also beautiful for them to go with their team members and think about the future. You know, we have to pause in a... non-common location where you're not used to to go and reflect on how can you prepare for the for the for the next thing you know for the next big scene
You get creative ideas and marketing ideas also. So for the listeners of this episode, if you want to get the best strategies in marketing, you need to have a place like that, I guess.
I love the concepts. And is that as well, Isabelle, is that where you decided to launch your first SaaS product?
Actually, yes. Actually, yes. So we...
GVTV. Thank you.
Yeah, we recently launched Lara. It's a powerful translator, universal translator. That's what we want to call it, universal translator. It's a tool that allows you to translate with the best technology. It's a combination of machine translation and large language models. We know a lot, we hear a lot about large language models, but it's a combination of... machine translation that is more, sticks more to the context and to the original text, but a little bit more of creativity with large language models and allows, does not allow too many hallucinations, you know?
Do you call them hallucinations, really?
Yes, that's what it's called. When it makes a mistake? Yes, it makes mistakes and it creates something that you haven't heard. asked for that's uh that's what it is it is about hallucinations yes so Lara is very revolutionary in our market especially I mean the language market is completely in a revolution right now and it's state-of-the-art so we have this language technology that also is critical of itself so it's adaptive it adapts to the context to And it learns from your past translations. So the more you translate, the more it learns from your style. And it is also critical from what it is, the output. So whenever it lacks context, it tells you, oh, I need a little bit of context translated in that way. So it's very interesting. And singularity in language is pretty near. singularity is the moment when the technology will be able to produce a result that is similar to the best translators out there. So we are pretty near to that. And with Lara, we think that we can reach the top 2% of our professional translators' quality in the very near months. So it's really amazing. and the API will be...
Sarah-Isabelle, how do you switch or shift your communication now that you have this Lara product, now that you're in SaaS? Is there any change that goes with it?
It's all a work in progress, so I cannot tell you. So we are all in this dynamic where we are thinking strategically how we are going to position ourselves. It's very overwhelming. because we've been in this industry as a service company for 25 years. Now we are adding a SaaS product to the market and it's something that is really new. So we are, again, surrounding ourselves with people that have done it before. And now as a consumer product, you have to end up with strategies that are maybe a little bit different from what you've done before. So... it opens lots of possibilities also here. For instance, starting with the local market, we have pretty soon the Jubileo in Rome that is starting in a couple of days. It's about having pilgrims coming in the eternal city of Rome. How can you take advantage of all that crowd that do not speak Italian? So how can you position all product there? There's an old discussion about how can we do that because it was just launched a few weeks ago and the Jubilair is starting pretty soon in 10 days. So yeah, we're all in. I wouldn't say in an emergency, but in a phase where we're strategically building new communication plans. And I can tell more in the next episode, maybe.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And just to stay on the topic of AI, because I think that's in the core of what you're doing now in the industry. We hear a lot in the marketing side that AI will take marketers' jobs. And I think it's also a big concern for the translation industry. And you told us during the preparation call and also right now that human is and will always be in the heart of the industry. I think it's the same for marketing. Can you maybe develop a bit on this aspect of how we humans work with AI and the way AI can help humans but not replace them? Because I think what you will see in translation is... very applicable to marketing too.
Yes, sure. So AI's role in industries like marketing and translation isn't about replacing humans, but it's about complementing and amplifying their abilities. AI excels at automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as data analysis, trend forecast, or creating initial draft of content or translations. but handling this task, it frees humans to focus on the aspect that requires creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking. For example, in marketing, AI can analyze customer behavior and suggest targeted campaigns, but it is the marketer who crafts the message in a way that resonates emotionally with the audience. Similarly, in translation, AI can produce a basic draft, but human translators ensure cultural sensitivity, tone, nuance, and accurately, they are accurately conveyed with the humans. So the real strength lies in collaboration to me. So AI and humans together are far more powerful than either alone. So AI brings efficiency and scalability and the ability to handle massive volume of work while humans provide the empathy, the cultural insight and the creative spark that machines cannot replicate.
Provided that they have a creativity villa in Tuscany.
Exactly.
Thank you so much,
Sabine. That's a good news. We won't be replaced yet by AI, but we will work and collaborate with AI to get even more great things done. Thanks a lot for this way of opening our discussion and for everything you shared in the discussion. Thanks a lot for your time. It was great having you on the podcast.
It was a pleasure, Isabelle. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much.
Thank you, and have a good day.
Bye. Bye. Thanks for
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Description
Co-founder of Translated, Isabelle Andrieu, shares the unconventional journey of building one of the world’s top translation companies—from hacking early SEO with the Simpson or celebrities content, to launching an AI-powered SaaS tool, and branding through a global sailing regatta. A powerful story of resilience, creativity, and believing in humans in the age of AI.
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
It's a beautiful story about resilience, about mounting a project that is so far away from what you traditionally would have done, that has brought us a lot of branding.
Welcome to Marketing, the podcast that helps you boost your digital marketing strategy with LinkedIn and with a bit of French accent. I'm François, Client Solutions Manager.
And I'm Aurélie, Account Director at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Our purpose is to initiate discussions around digital marketing, B2B, and LinkedIn to help you align your marketing strategy to your business goals and your audience's needs.
We will be joined by special guests, experts, clients to inspire you, inform you, and help you innovate. So grab pen and paper and let's get started.
Pen and paper? François, we're not in the 80s anymore.
Oh yeah, you're right. Well, open chat GPT, ask for a summary of this podcast, and let's get started anyway. Hello and welcome to this new episode of Marketing. I hope you're doing very well. We are surely doing well. And I'm, of course, with Aurélie. Hi, Aurélie, how are you?
Hey, François. I'm doing fine. I'm still very high in energy after our Be To Believe event two weeks ago. It was such a wonderful event where we had the chance to discuss the importance of the buyer group, the importance of influencer marketing and of vertical videos on LinkedIn. And where we had the chance to meet with Isabelle Andrieux, co-founder and chairwoman at Translated. Hello, Isabelle.
Hi. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me.
It's our pleasure to have you. It's really great that you're here in this episode because you have a lot to share about mostly brand and strategies and all this. And I'm sure that's going to be very interesting. But first, can you please start by introducing yourself and telling us a bit more about you?
Yes, sure. So my name is Isabelle. I'm French. as you can say by the name. And I co-founded my company back then in 1999 with my husband, Marco, when I was 22 years old. So we basically launched the first internet-based translation service called Translated. And today it's one of the largest translation companies. And the characteristics of the company is that we combine great human professional translators with AI. With our full-stack technology that we've built over the years, so we have 200 highly qualified professionals based in Rome with a pool of half a million professional translators. And we serve B2C, B2B, and large corporates, such as Airbnb, Uber, and NVIDIA. So I ended up playing different roles, starting being a translator myself. project manager, an account, chief operating officer. And today I'm also the chairwoman of the company. And I have still a very active role as I am head of people management. So HR department, but we call it people tower. So I take care of culture, training, hiring the best talents.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Isabelle, for this presentation and all those elements. and you talk about Translated being an old company, let's say, like a company with a lot of experience. And that's a great point because I wanted to go back to the creation of Translated and how you managed to get your name known in the translation space. When preparing the episode, you told me that you started to invest in brand really just four or five years ago. And as you say, Translated is now around 20 years, which means that during 15 years, You did without doing brand on purpose. That's something you told me. And my question is like, how did you do that? What strategies did you use to emerge without this big focus on brand? Yeah, you told me you even managed to have the most visited webpage in Italy. I'm sure many of our auditors would love to know how you did that and how this worked for you.
I think first thing first, it's really important to understand that there's a substantial difference between what people want and what people need. So when we started Translated back in 1999, nobody was really looking for an internet-based translation company. So we bought the domain name for $100. We were ready to go. I was fresh from the university. with a lot of ideas to create my company. Imagine two young adults, fresh, knowing nothing about branding and marketing, but really willing to create a translation business. So at that time, it was the beginning of the Internet. And we understood that this was an opportunity and it would have definitely changed the market landscape forever. But nobody wanted translations online. Instead, we saw that everyone was interested in downloading MP3 or sending text messages via the Internet, knowing information about the Simpsons or even Pamela Anderson. So this is exactly what we did. Before social media existed, we created content on the web about all these topics to allow search engines to find those contents. And on these pages, on this content, we were explaining to the people what translation was. and why it was possible to translate now online. And most importantly, we would advertise our translation service. So we literally put a translated banner on that pages. So we gave people what they wanted. They wanted to know about The Simpsons and Pamela Anderson. And at the same time, we would educate them to what was possible now and better for them. So translate their content. So instead of a standard translation company, they would now have the possibility to go for an online translation quotation and an online translation company. So this was not the most efficient way to do it. And we realized that over the years. But this worked perfectly well. And the page that we made became the most visited web pages in Italy with 30 million. unique visitors online per month and in 1999 i can tell you it was a lot and um but guess how many people who are searching for pamela anderson are interested in professional translations very few yeah maybe not that many not that many so that was uh good for the branding so people get to know new stuff but the conversion rate was extremely limited. This was a strategy that allowed people to discover something new, new ways of translating. So by leveraging trending topics to attract users and introduce the concept of online translation.
That's what you call real marketing, Isabelle. And also... One of the major challenges that you had is that in your market, you had huge competitors, right? Who had a huge visibility. How did you try to emerge in this niche market? What were other strategies that you used in order to emerge in this very competitive market? Apart from Pamela Anderson and the Simpsons, were there other tactics, other strategies that you leveraged?
Yes. So today, some companies think that Translated is a big company and that we are a very influential translation company in the language scape. And others can view us as a small 200 companies located in Italy. And we're actually beating with the Googles, the Microsofts, and the OpenAI for the best technology. It's not, there's no... Not easy. Not easy. But there are also a lot of other transition companies, more than 600,000, that have zero technology and do not know anything about AI. So everything is relative. So what I can tell you is that it was not easy to compete with the big brands like Google. It's not easy because there's something that is called dilution. And for instance, if you take Google. It does many things. And when you think about Google, can you think about Google identifying it as a translation company? I do not think so. Not really. Not really, exactly. So you trust Google for many, many things. It's obvious that they offer a translation company. But they lose a little bit of focus when it comes to the niche of translation. So having focus is very important. and doing something well allows you to have a competitive advantage that allows you also to move in the space with lots of agility and therefore express your full potential. So now in terms of strategy and visibility, we've pointed everything on digital marketing, as I mentioned before. acquisition strategy with very specific targets where we can measure very well what we're doing. And we were able to reach types of markets that were relevant at a global scale. And today, there are media that support this strategy better than Google. Google AdWords, for instance, is making us lose a bit of control while other platforms such as Microsoft and LinkedIn in in particular. support advertisers like us very well in terms of targeting and analytics. So competing as a smaller company in a niche market against giants with enormous visibility and budget constraints is undeniably challenging, but it also represents unique opportunities that play to our strengths.
Yeah, when you manage to have this focus and execute well, I guess. And also, I like what you said about when you started, you were creating content. So you already had a content strategy, even though you were creating content on other things to attract like traffic and all this. But it was already in this idea of creating content. One of the strategies you adopted that was quite recently, and I would like to talk about that, to go really bold with a regatta. and I would love that you help us understand yeah, a bit more what's this project about? How did it came? What it was exactly? And what did you achieve with it? You told us that the return on investment was huge. So I would love to hear more about that and hear how this is balancing with your digital marketing strategy that you just discussed before.
Yeah, this sounds, it's a crazy project, basically.
It sounds like this, yes.
It is absolutely crazy. so we were in search with a new way to promote our service and to position ourselves. And because Translator does a lot of technology, but we have this beautiful combination between humans and machines, our motto is we believe in humans because we've always put humans at the center, at the core of what we're doing. We do not use technology against humans, but we enhance human skills with technology. So we believe in humans is our motto. And back then... Three and a half years ago, after COVID, we were literally going out with my family for a short vacation. The only thing that you could do was sailing at sea. That was the only thing that you could allow yourself to do. And my husband, who suffers normally from severe seasickness, was fine after three days. And I had removed the sailing option in my brain because I knew that my husband was really sick. But something happened. He started falling in love with sailing and starting searching for a boat to buy. And people tried to convince him that that was the worst thing to do because you are happy when you buy the boat and when you sell the boat. And in the middle, it's a lot of money. But anyway, we were in Tuscany in the villa that we use for creativity that we share with among our team and there's a beautiful window there where we could see sailing boats passing. So that started populating our minds and we thought that, I mean, we liked the idea of sailing anyway. When he searched for the boat, Google advertisement started doing the rest because we started receiving lots of advertisement for boats. And one in particular was the regatta, the 50th anniversary of the Whitbread Round World, a very famous regatta, one of the most adventurous regatta, that for the 50th anniversary would allow boats from 15 years ago to sail around the world in four steps. without technology. And that immediately resonated in our brains. How could a technological company start a project so ambitious without any knowledge of sailing, surrounding themselves by people who knew a little bit more about sailing than us, and telling about the story? So that's what we did. We bought the boat. We surrounded ourselves with the best professionals, selected 1,500 but people around the world to join us in this amazing adventure. actually did the ourselves so we we had many many people uh responding to our call professionals and non-professionals and the the project went on in september 2023 we so it's a it's an it's a it's a tremendous story we actually became uh first uh on the first leg first on the second leg We were about to be first on the third as well, but we broke the boat, we recovered and then back on track for the fourth leg. We were also about to win the fourth leg and then we broke the skull again, but we finished the race. It's a beautiful story about resilience, about mounting a project that is so far away from what you traditionally would have done that has brought us a lot of branding. a lot of fans that were following the project. And whenever you come to the table with a big client and tell about the story, it makes a difference knowing that the two co-founders and also part of the team has done a regatta that is so adventurous. It can tell a lot about the people you are in front of and that allow themselves to think big. And to not be afraid and not be scared of bigger things.
And just a quick question. How did your position translated into this? Was it like branding on the boat? Or how did you use that? Maybe did you have some, created some content that you pushed online or something like this?
Yes, absolutely. So the boat was branded. So the We Believe in Humans was written on the side of the boat. We had actually two boats, one that we prepared for the regatta that would sail around the world in four steps, four legs, and another boat that we strategically bought and put in San Francisco Bay Area, where we mostly have our clients. And we would invite potential prospects, potential clients to sail with us over the weekend with a superstar of the sailing environment that is called Paul Cagliard. a sailor who has won several times the America's Cup. And with Paul Cahill being very well known in the U.S. ecosystem, would train the people over the weekend, and they would either decide to sail with us for the project or just have fun. And this ended up with more than 700 people who got trained on Saturdays and Sundays. for more than two years. And it opened so many doors for us because when it comes to doing something else than business, you get to know very well the people and you start having meaningful conversations with everyone. So it's a powerful connection with potential prospects. So that's what we did. So two boats, one in San Francisco and the other one for De Regata.
Beautiful story. Yeah. Thank you, Isabelle. Really nice story. And I love the Creativity Villa in Tuscany. I wonder if we're going to be invited someday.
Yeah, the Villa in Tuscany is a villa that we bought for the 20th anniversary of the company. And we thought that it was... So, first of all, because as a community, you know, when you're a founder, you want to create impact. And impact is something that I... I really like as a keyword. So creating impact is also how do you behave with your community? What can you create? It's about having responsibility for whatever you're doing as an entrepreneur, you know. And so we bought this villa because none of us by themselves would have afforded such a villa in Tuscany, in a very beautiful area where you can see the sea, the mountains. It's beautiful. And we gave it back to our community. So we go there for off-sites. We share the villa among our employees. If they are in the company for more than four years, they have coins that they can use the villa for themselves and their family to rest. And it's also beautiful for them to go with their team members and think about the future. You know, we have to pause in a... non-common location where you're not used to to go and reflect on how can you prepare for the for the for the next thing you know for the next big scene
You get creative ideas and marketing ideas also. So for the listeners of this episode, if you want to get the best strategies in marketing, you need to have a place like that, I guess.
I love the concepts. And is that as well, Isabelle, is that where you decided to launch your first SaaS product?
Actually, yes. Actually, yes. So we...
GVTV. Thank you.
Yeah, we recently launched Lara. It's a powerful translator, universal translator. That's what we want to call it, universal translator. It's a tool that allows you to translate with the best technology. It's a combination of machine translation and large language models. We know a lot, we hear a lot about large language models, but it's a combination of... machine translation that is more, sticks more to the context and to the original text, but a little bit more of creativity with large language models and allows, does not allow too many hallucinations, you know?
Do you call them hallucinations, really?
Yes, that's what it's called. When it makes a mistake? Yes, it makes mistakes and it creates something that you haven't heard. asked for that's uh that's what it is it is about hallucinations yes so Lara is very revolutionary in our market especially I mean the language market is completely in a revolution right now and it's state-of-the-art so we have this language technology that also is critical of itself so it's adaptive it adapts to the context to And it learns from your past translations. So the more you translate, the more it learns from your style. And it is also critical from what it is, the output. So whenever it lacks context, it tells you, oh, I need a little bit of context translated in that way. So it's very interesting. And singularity in language is pretty near. singularity is the moment when the technology will be able to produce a result that is similar to the best translators out there. So we are pretty near to that. And with Lara, we think that we can reach the top 2% of our professional translators' quality in the very near months. So it's really amazing. and the API will be...
Sarah-Isabelle, how do you switch or shift your communication now that you have this Lara product, now that you're in SaaS? Is there any change that goes with it?
It's all a work in progress, so I cannot tell you. So we are all in this dynamic where we are thinking strategically how we are going to position ourselves. It's very overwhelming. because we've been in this industry as a service company for 25 years. Now we are adding a SaaS product to the market and it's something that is really new. So we are, again, surrounding ourselves with people that have done it before. And now as a consumer product, you have to end up with strategies that are maybe a little bit different from what you've done before. So... it opens lots of possibilities also here. For instance, starting with the local market, we have pretty soon the Jubileo in Rome that is starting in a couple of days. It's about having pilgrims coming in the eternal city of Rome. How can you take advantage of all that crowd that do not speak Italian? So how can you position all product there? There's an old discussion about how can we do that because it was just launched a few weeks ago and the Jubilair is starting pretty soon in 10 days. So yeah, we're all in. I wouldn't say in an emergency, but in a phase where we're strategically building new communication plans. And I can tell more in the next episode, maybe.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And just to stay on the topic of AI, because I think that's in the core of what you're doing now in the industry. We hear a lot in the marketing side that AI will take marketers' jobs. And I think it's also a big concern for the translation industry. And you told us during the preparation call and also right now that human is and will always be in the heart of the industry. I think it's the same for marketing. Can you maybe develop a bit on this aspect of how we humans work with AI and the way AI can help humans but not replace them? Because I think what you will see in translation is... very applicable to marketing too.
Yes, sure. So AI's role in industries like marketing and translation isn't about replacing humans, but it's about complementing and amplifying their abilities. AI excels at automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as data analysis, trend forecast, or creating initial draft of content or translations. but handling this task, it frees humans to focus on the aspect that requires creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking. For example, in marketing, AI can analyze customer behavior and suggest targeted campaigns, but it is the marketer who crafts the message in a way that resonates emotionally with the audience. Similarly, in translation, AI can produce a basic draft, but human translators ensure cultural sensitivity, tone, nuance, and accurately, they are accurately conveyed with the humans. So the real strength lies in collaboration to me. So AI and humans together are far more powerful than either alone. So AI brings efficiency and scalability and the ability to handle massive volume of work while humans provide the empathy, the cultural insight and the creative spark that machines cannot replicate.
Provided that they have a creativity villa in Tuscany.
Exactly.
Thank you so much,
Sabine. That's a good news. We won't be replaced yet by AI, but we will work and collaborate with AI to get even more great things done. Thanks a lot for this way of opening our discussion and for everything you shared in the discussion. Thanks a lot for your time. It was great having you on the podcast.
It was a pleasure, Isabelle. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much.
Thank you, and have a good day.
Bye. Bye. Thanks for
Description
Co-founder of Translated, Isabelle Andrieu, shares the unconventional journey of building one of the world’s top translation companies—from hacking early SEO with the Simpson or celebrities content, to launching an AI-powered SaaS tool, and branding through a global sailing regatta. A powerful story of resilience, creativity, and believing in humans in the age of AI.
Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.
Transcription
It's a beautiful story about resilience, about mounting a project that is so far away from what you traditionally would have done, that has brought us a lot of branding.
Welcome to Marketing, the podcast that helps you boost your digital marketing strategy with LinkedIn and with a bit of French accent. I'm François, Client Solutions Manager.
And I'm Aurélie, Account Director at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Our purpose is to initiate discussions around digital marketing, B2B, and LinkedIn to help you align your marketing strategy to your business goals and your audience's needs.
We will be joined by special guests, experts, clients to inspire you, inform you, and help you innovate. So grab pen and paper and let's get started.
Pen and paper? François, we're not in the 80s anymore.
Oh yeah, you're right. Well, open chat GPT, ask for a summary of this podcast, and let's get started anyway. Hello and welcome to this new episode of Marketing. I hope you're doing very well. We are surely doing well. And I'm, of course, with Aurélie. Hi, Aurélie, how are you?
Hey, François. I'm doing fine. I'm still very high in energy after our Be To Believe event two weeks ago. It was such a wonderful event where we had the chance to discuss the importance of the buyer group, the importance of influencer marketing and of vertical videos on LinkedIn. And where we had the chance to meet with Isabelle Andrieux, co-founder and chairwoman at Translated. Hello, Isabelle.
Hi. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me.
It's our pleasure to have you. It's really great that you're here in this episode because you have a lot to share about mostly brand and strategies and all this. And I'm sure that's going to be very interesting. But first, can you please start by introducing yourself and telling us a bit more about you?
Yes, sure. So my name is Isabelle. I'm French. as you can say by the name. And I co-founded my company back then in 1999 with my husband, Marco, when I was 22 years old. So we basically launched the first internet-based translation service called Translated. And today it's one of the largest translation companies. And the characteristics of the company is that we combine great human professional translators with AI. With our full-stack technology that we've built over the years, so we have 200 highly qualified professionals based in Rome with a pool of half a million professional translators. And we serve B2C, B2B, and large corporates, such as Airbnb, Uber, and NVIDIA. So I ended up playing different roles, starting being a translator myself. project manager, an account, chief operating officer. And today I'm also the chairwoman of the company. And I have still a very active role as I am head of people management. So HR department, but we call it people tower. So I take care of culture, training, hiring the best talents.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Isabelle, for this presentation and all those elements. and you talk about Translated being an old company, let's say, like a company with a lot of experience. And that's a great point because I wanted to go back to the creation of Translated and how you managed to get your name known in the translation space. When preparing the episode, you told me that you started to invest in brand really just four or five years ago. And as you say, Translated is now around 20 years, which means that during 15 years, You did without doing brand on purpose. That's something you told me. And my question is like, how did you do that? What strategies did you use to emerge without this big focus on brand? Yeah, you told me you even managed to have the most visited webpage in Italy. I'm sure many of our auditors would love to know how you did that and how this worked for you.
I think first thing first, it's really important to understand that there's a substantial difference between what people want and what people need. So when we started Translated back in 1999, nobody was really looking for an internet-based translation company. So we bought the domain name for $100. We were ready to go. I was fresh from the university. with a lot of ideas to create my company. Imagine two young adults, fresh, knowing nothing about branding and marketing, but really willing to create a translation business. So at that time, it was the beginning of the Internet. And we understood that this was an opportunity and it would have definitely changed the market landscape forever. But nobody wanted translations online. Instead, we saw that everyone was interested in downloading MP3 or sending text messages via the Internet, knowing information about the Simpsons or even Pamela Anderson. So this is exactly what we did. Before social media existed, we created content on the web about all these topics to allow search engines to find those contents. And on these pages, on this content, we were explaining to the people what translation was. and why it was possible to translate now online. And most importantly, we would advertise our translation service. So we literally put a translated banner on that pages. So we gave people what they wanted. They wanted to know about The Simpsons and Pamela Anderson. And at the same time, we would educate them to what was possible now and better for them. So translate their content. So instead of a standard translation company, they would now have the possibility to go for an online translation quotation and an online translation company. So this was not the most efficient way to do it. And we realized that over the years. But this worked perfectly well. And the page that we made became the most visited web pages in Italy with 30 million. unique visitors online per month and in 1999 i can tell you it was a lot and um but guess how many people who are searching for pamela anderson are interested in professional translations very few yeah maybe not that many not that many so that was uh good for the branding so people get to know new stuff but the conversion rate was extremely limited. This was a strategy that allowed people to discover something new, new ways of translating. So by leveraging trending topics to attract users and introduce the concept of online translation.
That's what you call real marketing, Isabelle. And also... One of the major challenges that you had is that in your market, you had huge competitors, right? Who had a huge visibility. How did you try to emerge in this niche market? What were other strategies that you used in order to emerge in this very competitive market? Apart from Pamela Anderson and the Simpsons, were there other tactics, other strategies that you leveraged?
Yes. So today, some companies think that Translated is a big company and that we are a very influential translation company in the language scape. And others can view us as a small 200 companies located in Italy. And we're actually beating with the Googles, the Microsofts, and the OpenAI for the best technology. It's not, there's no... Not easy. Not easy. But there are also a lot of other transition companies, more than 600,000, that have zero technology and do not know anything about AI. So everything is relative. So what I can tell you is that it was not easy to compete with the big brands like Google. It's not easy because there's something that is called dilution. And for instance, if you take Google. It does many things. And when you think about Google, can you think about Google identifying it as a translation company? I do not think so. Not really. Not really, exactly. So you trust Google for many, many things. It's obvious that they offer a translation company. But they lose a little bit of focus when it comes to the niche of translation. So having focus is very important. and doing something well allows you to have a competitive advantage that allows you also to move in the space with lots of agility and therefore express your full potential. So now in terms of strategy and visibility, we've pointed everything on digital marketing, as I mentioned before. acquisition strategy with very specific targets where we can measure very well what we're doing. And we were able to reach types of markets that were relevant at a global scale. And today, there are media that support this strategy better than Google. Google AdWords, for instance, is making us lose a bit of control while other platforms such as Microsoft and LinkedIn in in particular. support advertisers like us very well in terms of targeting and analytics. So competing as a smaller company in a niche market against giants with enormous visibility and budget constraints is undeniably challenging, but it also represents unique opportunities that play to our strengths.
Yeah, when you manage to have this focus and execute well, I guess. And also, I like what you said about when you started, you were creating content. So you already had a content strategy, even though you were creating content on other things to attract like traffic and all this. But it was already in this idea of creating content. One of the strategies you adopted that was quite recently, and I would like to talk about that, to go really bold with a regatta. and I would love that you help us understand yeah, a bit more what's this project about? How did it came? What it was exactly? And what did you achieve with it? You told us that the return on investment was huge. So I would love to hear more about that and hear how this is balancing with your digital marketing strategy that you just discussed before.
Yeah, this sounds, it's a crazy project, basically.
It sounds like this, yes.
It is absolutely crazy. so we were in search with a new way to promote our service and to position ourselves. And because Translator does a lot of technology, but we have this beautiful combination between humans and machines, our motto is we believe in humans because we've always put humans at the center, at the core of what we're doing. We do not use technology against humans, but we enhance human skills with technology. So we believe in humans is our motto. And back then... Three and a half years ago, after COVID, we were literally going out with my family for a short vacation. The only thing that you could do was sailing at sea. That was the only thing that you could allow yourself to do. And my husband, who suffers normally from severe seasickness, was fine after three days. And I had removed the sailing option in my brain because I knew that my husband was really sick. But something happened. He started falling in love with sailing and starting searching for a boat to buy. And people tried to convince him that that was the worst thing to do because you are happy when you buy the boat and when you sell the boat. And in the middle, it's a lot of money. But anyway, we were in Tuscany in the villa that we use for creativity that we share with among our team and there's a beautiful window there where we could see sailing boats passing. So that started populating our minds and we thought that, I mean, we liked the idea of sailing anyway. When he searched for the boat, Google advertisement started doing the rest because we started receiving lots of advertisement for boats. And one in particular was the regatta, the 50th anniversary of the Whitbread Round World, a very famous regatta, one of the most adventurous regatta, that for the 50th anniversary would allow boats from 15 years ago to sail around the world in four steps. without technology. And that immediately resonated in our brains. How could a technological company start a project so ambitious without any knowledge of sailing, surrounding themselves by people who knew a little bit more about sailing than us, and telling about the story? So that's what we did. We bought the boat. We surrounded ourselves with the best professionals, selected 1,500 but people around the world to join us in this amazing adventure. actually did the ourselves so we we had many many people uh responding to our call professionals and non-professionals and the the project went on in september 2023 we so it's a it's an it's a it's a tremendous story we actually became uh first uh on the first leg first on the second leg We were about to be first on the third as well, but we broke the boat, we recovered and then back on track for the fourth leg. We were also about to win the fourth leg and then we broke the skull again, but we finished the race. It's a beautiful story about resilience, about mounting a project that is so far away from what you traditionally would have done that has brought us a lot of branding. a lot of fans that were following the project. And whenever you come to the table with a big client and tell about the story, it makes a difference knowing that the two co-founders and also part of the team has done a regatta that is so adventurous. It can tell a lot about the people you are in front of and that allow themselves to think big. And to not be afraid and not be scared of bigger things.
And just a quick question. How did your position translated into this? Was it like branding on the boat? Or how did you use that? Maybe did you have some, created some content that you pushed online or something like this?
Yes, absolutely. So the boat was branded. So the We Believe in Humans was written on the side of the boat. We had actually two boats, one that we prepared for the regatta that would sail around the world in four steps, four legs, and another boat that we strategically bought and put in San Francisco Bay Area, where we mostly have our clients. And we would invite potential prospects, potential clients to sail with us over the weekend with a superstar of the sailing environment that is called Paul Cagliard. a sailor who has won several times the America's Cup. And with Paul Cahill being very well known in the U.S. ecosystem, would train the people over the weekend, and they would either decide to sail with us for the project or just have fun. And this ended up with more than 700 people who got trained on Saturdays and Sundays. for more than two years. And it opened so many doors for us because when it comes to doing something else than business, you get to know very well the people and you start having meaningful conversations with everyone. So it's a powerful connection with potential prospects. So that's what we did. So two boats, one in San Francisco and the other one for De Regata.
Beautiful story. Yeah. Thank you, Isabelle. Really nice story. And I love the Creativity Villa in Tuscany. I wonder if we're going to be invited someday.
Yeah, the Villa in Tuscany is a villa that we bought for the 20th anniversary of the company. And we thought that it was... So, first of all, because as a community, you know, when you're a founder, you want to create impact. And impact is something that I... I really like as a keyword. So creating impact is also how do you behave with your community? What can you create? It's about having responsibility for whatever you're doing as an entrepreneur, you know. And so we bought this villa because none of us by themselves would have afforded such a villa in Tuscany, in a very beautiful area where you can see the sea, the mountains. It's beautiful. And we gave it back to our community. So we go there for off-sites. We share the villa among our employees. If they are in the company for more than four years, they have coins that they can use the villa for themselves and their family to rest. And it's also beautiful for them to go with their team members and think about the future. You know, we have to pause in a... non-common location where you're not used to to go and reflect on how can you prepare for the for the for the next thing you know for the next big scene
You get creative ideas and marketing ideas also. So for the listeners of this episode, if you want to get the best strategies in marketing, you need to have a place like that, I guess.
I love the concepts. And is that as well, Isabelle, is that where you decided to launch your first SaaS product?
Actually, yes. Actually, yes. So we...
GVTV. Thank you.
Yeah, we recently launched Lara. It's a powerful translator, universal translator. That's what we want to call it, universal translator. It's a tool that allows you to translate with the best technology. It's a combination of machine translation and large language models. We know a lot, we hear a lot about large language models, but it's a combination of... machine translation that is more, sticks more to the context and to the original text, but a little bit more of creativity with large language models and allows, does not allow too many hallucinations, you know?
Do you call them hallucinations, really?
Yes, that's what it's called. When it makes a mistake? Yes, it makes mistakes and it creates something that you haven't heard. asked for that's uh that's what it is it is about hallucinations yes so Lara is very revolutionary in our market especially I mean the language market is completely in a revolution right now and it's state-of-the-art so we have this language technology that also is critical of itself so it's adaptive it adapts to the context to And it learns from your past translations. So the more you translate, the more it learns from your style. And it is also critical from what it is, the output. So whenever it lacks context, it tells you, oh, I need a little bit of context translated in that way. So it's very interesting. And singularity in language is pretty near. singularity is the moment when the technology will be able to produce a result that is similar to the best translators out there. So we are pretty near to that. And with Lara, we think that we can reach the top 2% of our professional translators' quality in the very near months. So it's really amazing. and the API will be...
Sarah-Isabelle, how do you switch or shift your communication now that you have this Lara product, now that you're in SaaS? Is there any change that goes with it?
It's all a work in progress, so I cannot tell you. So we are all in this dynamic where we are thinking strategically how we are going to position ourselves. It's very overwhelming. because we've been in this industry as a service company for 25 years. Now we are adding a SaaS product to the market and it's something that is really new. So we are, again, surrounding ourselves with people that have done it before. And now as a consumer product, you have to end up with strategies that are maybe a little bit different from what you've done before. So... it opens lots of possibilities also here. For instance, starting with the local market, we have pretty soon the Jubileo in Rome that is starting in a couple of days. It's about having pilgrims coming in the eternal city of Rome. How can you take advantage of all that crowd that do not speak Italian? So how can you position all product there? There's an old discussion about how can we do that because it was just launched a few weeks ago and the Jubilair is starting pretty soon in 10 days. So yeah, we're all in. I wouldn't say in an emergency, but in a phase where we're strategically building new communication plans. And I can tell more in the next episode, maybe.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And just to stay on the topic of AI, because I think that's in the core of what you're doing now in the industry. We hear a lot in the marketing side that AI will take marketers' jobs. And I think it's also a big concern for the translation industry. And you told us during the preparation call and also right now that human is and will always be in the heart of the industry. I think it's the same for marketing. Can you maybe develop a bit on this aspect of how we humans work with AI and the way AI can help humans but not replace them? Because I think what you will see in translation is... very applicable to marketing too.
Yes, sure. So AI's role in industries like marketing and translation isn't about replacing humans, but it's about complementing and amplifying their abilities. AI excels at automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as data analysis, trend forecast, or creating initial draft of content or translations. but handling this task, it frees humans to focus on the aspect that requires creativity, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking. For example, in marketing, AI can analyze customer behavior and suggest targeted campaigns, but it is the marketer who crafts the message in a way that resonates emotionally with the audience. Similarly, in translation, AI can produce a basic draft, but human translators ensure cultural sensitivity, tone, nuance, and accurately, they are accurately conveyed with the humans. So the real strength lies in collaboration to me. So AI and humans together are far more powerful than either alone. So AI brings efficiency and scalability and the ability to handle massive volume of work while humans provide the empathy, the cultural insight and the creative spark that machines cannot replicate.
Provided that they have a creativity villa in Tuscany.
Exactly.
Thank you so much,
Sabine. That's a good news. We won't be replaced yet by AI, but we will work and collaborate with AI to get even more great things done. Thanks a lot for this way of opening our discussion and for everything you shared in the discussion. Thanks a lot for your time. It was great having you on the podcast.
It was a pleasure, Isabelle. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much.
Thank you, and have a good day.
Bye. Bye. Thanks for
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