How we launched…Traditional Chinese
Building out the internationalisation of a software company is a step-by-step process. The odds are that you’re not going to begin with a complete or fixed language offering that you build once, release and never touch again. Instead, it’s more likely that your language portfolio is flexible and growing, which means you will probably find yourself in the situation Pipedrive was in during October, with a new language to launch. The translation journey wasn’t something we could do overnight, but thanks to some handy decisions we made and solutions built into our platform, it was also a fairly painless one (unless of course, you are updating your internal tools at the same time — more on that later!). Hopefully, the following retrospective, based on the key questions we asked ourselves at each stage, will provide some insight into how we at Pipedrive add a new language to our platform from start to finish, and why we chose Traditional Chinese as language number 18.
- Does this language/market align with our strategy?
According to Busuu, there are 6,500 languages in the world. In 2019 Pipedrive offered 17, which meant there were 6,483 potential languages to add to our software. How did we end up identifying Traditional Chinese as the next language to add?
Although the process began much earlier, the first step was in December 2019. Within the Localization Team, we made an analysis of our customer base, the competitive landscape in the CRM sphere, looked at market potentials and other indicators, and internally published a shortlist of languages and markets of interest (if you’re interested in learning more, I recently discussed this process on the Global Ambitions podcast). It was pretty important to us that we didn’t just make a random decision in isolation, so we published the list and canvassed feedback from internal stakeholders. Are any of these languages interesting, or are there any other languages that would help you in your work?
Traditional Chinese wasn’t on the list initially, but it emerged as a language of interest for two reasons. Firstly, we have reseller partners based in both Taiwan and Hong Kong, who were keen for us to support their efforts to sell to non-English speakers in their markets. Whilst that was useful, on its own it did little to distinguish the language from any other; Pipedrive has many resellers and partners in many languages and markets for which we don’t yet offer a localized product, so although it certainly helped, on its own it wasn’t enough.
But with recent efforts to increase our presence in Japan and Korea, adding Chinese was seen as an important step in strengthening our position in the East Asian marketplace. With an important strategic focus on neighbouring markets, it became clear that launching Traditional Chinese could be a useful test run for launching its more widely used cousin, Simplified Chinese, at some point in the future. Suddenly, Traditional Chinese seemed like a more attractive proposition.
The decision wasn’t yet made, but it prompted us to look at the language in more detail. Written Chinese went through its first standardisation in the 2nd Century BC, some 2,000 years ago, although it actually dates back even further to 1250BC. Though the spoken language split into the mutually unintelligible variants we know today such as Mandarin (920 million native speakers), Cantonese (84 million speakers) or Wu (80 million native speakers), speakers of these languages all used a common form of the written language until the 1950s. At that point, a process of character simplification reduced the number of strokes and characters in the written language, but because of the complex geopolitical situation in the Chinese-speaking world and the dispersal of the Chinese-speaking diaspora, the simplified characters were not accepted everywhere: the simplified characters were adopted predominantly in the People’s Republic of China as well as Singapore and Malaysia, while Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau continued using traditional characters.
Though we weren’t quite ready to launch in China, the combined Hong Kong + Taiwan market is 30 million people. Moreover, both territories have advanced software capabilities, technological development and widespread internet coverage, while English ability was assessed as moderate by the English First Proficiency index. Though both territories are in a complicated space geopolitically (and this was most definitely a debate we wanted to stand aside from), from a purely economic and business standpoint, it made sense.
The language therefore came onto our radar thanks to our internal partners, and through further research developed into something worth considering as a future direction of growth. The deciding factor was that the expertise gathered from this experience would help us use the language as a stepping stone for growth in China, and after considering the costs and return on investment potential, in January 2020, the decision was made to proceed with localization.
2. Who will carry out the translation? Selecting a Partner
With the commitment to localize complete, the next step was finding a translator/proofreader team. We outsource our localization to Neuma translation agency, which made a tender competition. In this instance, we had a couple of extra resources we could draw on: we have a number of Chinese employees who had contacts in the translation industry, and Taiwan-based partners who also suggested a translator team with whom they had previously worked. We invited all of these different teams to enter themselves into the competition too.
Once we had received the “expressions of interest” and quotes, we made a shortlist. We developed a test project based on a small, recently-launched microservice and one small web page, and sent these to the teams on the shortlist. For us it was important to assess how well the translators worked on both technical texts, as well as creative content. Given that Pipedrive has a very friendly, joking and slightly colloquial tone, we assessed for tone of voice and readability as well as accuracy (although given the cultural norms in different markets, this isn’t completely inflexible — we listened to our translators in other markets if they argued this wasn’t a good idea). We had 2 evaluators independently score the test tasks, one of which was an internal employee from Taiwan and the other was an external vendor who didn’t enter the competition (in order to avoid bias).
I am aware that certain unscrupulous vendors in creative industries try to use test tasks in an ethically-dubious way. I myself once applied for a translation job in competition, was awarded the contract, and when I set to work on their website noticed that the test tasks (for which I and the other applicants hadn’t been paid) had been published — Free content!! (except it became apparent the vendor was unethical in other ways too — needless to say I didn’t stay in that contract for too long). At Pipedrive we definitely don’t do this!
Based on the evaluation feedback, we moved forward but there were still a few more steps before the winning team was selected. I’m a strong believer that vendor-client relationship is about more than output or rates, but also about compatibility and collaboration. We want translators with whom we feel that we can work effectively, and most importantly, with whom we can communicate and who feel free to give us honest feedback. It’s not simply a case of selecting the team with the best rates or the best quality, because if you find later down the road that you can’t work effectively together, this is a failure of the recruitment and selection process. Maybe it takes a little longer, but at the end of the process, everyone is confident that they’ve entered into a successful long term partnership, rather than the cheapest or fastest.
3. What/How to translate your product?
With the partner selected, it was finally time to dive in and start translating! We use CrowdIn to manage our localization process, and here the advantage of using such a platform becomes clear. We decided to start by translating our product, and managing this in CrowdIn was as simple as going into the Project Settings, selecting the additional language and, as if by magic, the content had duplicated itself and a new language had appeared in the homepage interface with 0% translation progress, a blank slate into which our translators could begin their work.
One of the additional advantages with CrowdIn is the ability to integrate directly with your product to provide in-context translation, and we took advantage of this to allow our translators to see exactly how the texts looked in situ. Our guidelines when translators begin is not to use the main CrowdIn repository but to begin with contextual translations —open the app, look around, play with different features and translate the terms on the pages you can see. In this way, the most important “core” terminology and jargon, which may be unclear when removed of context, will be complete plus the translators get to know the tool, its navigation and visual interface, and more importantly, its value to customers.
So with the team set up, now it was time for us to sit back and relax with a margarita, right? Not quite. The translation process took around five months, and most of this time we spent answering queries from translators and providing screenshots. Starting with the main framework of the product gave us a quick, visible sign of the progress being made, but as the team buried deeper into individual microservices, the texts became more complex and specific, and trickier for them to reproduce. I always characterise the Localization team as the bridge between translators and developers, and here our product expertise came especially handy. As the project progressed, we were called to answer questions about ever more obscure texts and edge cases in more specialised features, but the end result was a well-translated product ready for the Taiwan/Hong Kong market.
Once the product translations were complete, we turned our attention to our web experience. As a web-based Software-as-a-Service product, the web is the gateway to the Pipedrive product. Our customers literally can’t use Pipedrive without visiting our web, so we regard our Minimum Viable Translation as including both web and product. This meant that we could queue the development task for activating the new language for product, and direct our translators to start working on our web experience, and even though the product activation was done fairly quickly, we were able to do a “silent release” of the new language inside the Product only. A few eagle-eyed customers noticed and changed their language, but by and large it passed completely under the radar (or at least we didn’t receive a deluge of complaints that the Chinese language was missing on the web).
Using CrowdIn, combined with Pipedrive’s codestack logic, meant that activating the in-app language is a relatively painless task. We add the language to our Translator client, download the completed translations from CrowdIn where the new language is already present, and then it’s just a case of adding the language to the picker and running a Quality Check to ensure everything is working ok. The Web, on the other hand, turned into another story altogether…
4. Roadblocks on the Information Superhighway
When we began the process of translating our Web assets to Traditional Chinese, we ran into a roadblock which was both an opportunity and a massive headache. The tribe responsible for the development and engineering of Marketing assets (of which our public web is one) were in the process of relaunching our Web Content Management System and overhauling our existing web content. This was wonderful because it meant that the developers only needed to add the new language when they were setting up the new CMS (rather than reconfiguring the old one), and the content would automatically begin the send and fetch with CrowdIn. Additionally, as each page underwent its content refresh and the new content was sent to the Translation Management Platform, the Chinese translator team would simply work in parallel with the other language teams, and the Web Publishing team would just publish Chinese alongside all of the other languages when the refreshed content was ready (the only difference being that the Chinese team were translating the page from scratch, while the other teams were only translating the refreshed elements).
Seamless….except that the CMS overhaul was expected to land in some 3–4 months, and the refreshed content another 2–3 months on top of that, which meant the full language launch would be another 5 to 7 months on top of the 5 months it had taken us to translate the product. From a business perspective, this didn’t make a lot of sense: We had already invested a significant sum in the product translation, and without a webpage this new asset we had just invested in would be sitting dormant. In fact, it wouldn’t even be dormant, as there would be a running cost of maintaining Product translations while we were waiting for the web CMS and content relaunch to be completed.
Rather than sit around and wait, at Pipedrive we like to come up with solutions, so a compromise was found: we would assemble an elite, strike team to create a single Chinese landing page summarising all of the key information from our other essential, high-traffic pages, and hook this up to our flow for sign-up (for new users) or login (for existing users). In addition, the page would serve as a resource for our Taiwanese partners to contact potential customers.
With the help of our Conversion Specialist and the Web Publishing team, we used existing content blocks and visual assets to avoid burdening the designers with temporary content and the developers working on the CMS mission, and we stitched together a Frankenstein’s monster of a page; a beautiful hero block, an in-depth pricing block, some testimonials, a “Why use a CRM?” block, and regular sign-up buttons and CTAs (Calls to Actions). I have to say, I love working with my colleagues, but it is when problems and projects like this emerge that you truly appreciate how intelligent, talented and incredible the people working at Pipedrive are. We slightly misused Optimizely and set up the page as a test, directing visitors from Taiwan and Hong Kong to this special page, and voila: we could start to convert customers from these markets and make use of the new asset!
Ultimately, this compromise made everyone happy:
- The developers could continue working on the CMS relaunch without having to worry about building assets for a new page or, even worse, doing the same job twice by adding a new language to a soon-to-be-deprecated CMS.
- The Web Publishing Team had to do a little bit of double work, creating a short term landing page that would be deprecated after a few months, but by recycling assets and content blocks from existing pages, the process was fairly straightforward (or so it seemed to me. If you ask my colleague, maybe she will disagree!)
- The Global Growth and Partners were happy that they could start using this asset to help customers in Taiwan and Hong Kong to sign up immediately, without having to wait for up to 7 more months (taking the lead time to an entire year) for the asset to go live.
- And the Localization team avoided using our budget servicing a dormant asset and could start demonstrating return on investment immediately.
Then, once the content refresh and CMS missions had landed (six months later), we simply turned off the test, closed the page (which was emotional, like sending your child off for their first day at school), and a shiny, completely translated Traditional Chinese web experience was ready for the customers.
5. Converting the New Language into Growth
It was great to translate our product and Web, but putting it live simply gets us to the starting line. As Alex Ferguson once said, “You sign for Manchester United—and that’s when the hard work begins!” and so it is with localizing a language. We had a product; now was the time to start winning customers.
Our growth strategy for launching new markets depends on conditions in the target area, but in this case, the decision to add the language was largely Partner-based, so once we launched we were quite happy to hand it over to them. That said, there were a couple of steps we took to ensure the maximum impact.
Firstly, we sent emails and an in-app message to existing customers to let them know that the new language was available. We then carried out a PR exercise to generate wider visibility in the market, and an onboarding flow that ensured our new customers were being properly welcomed and introduced to the product by our partners.
The impact of adding a new language is definitely not immediate, but we have enough data to know that it causes significant jumps in conversion rates, as well as having a positive impact on churn, so we track the performance at a number of milestones (quarterly, six month, and annual impacts) but with a heavy dose of expectation-setting. However, when we evaluated the 12-month impact, we were extremely happy to see the outcome — a 50% YoY growth, far outstripping other localized, non-localized and East-Asian markets. Such results tend to be sustained, so we are looking forward to continued success in this language over the coming years!
Additionally, the number of customers switching and using the new language validated our assumptions about how necessary the language was. We had launched Swedish 6 months earlier, but the proportion of users in Taiwan using the Chinese-language app had rapidly outpaced those in Sweden using Swedish.
6. Conclusions
Taiwan and Traditional Chinese may not have been an obvious choice for a new language to add to Pipedrive. Certainly, we identified other markets with more favourable conditions, greater growth potential and higher customer ceiling, but the decision has to include other internal stakeholders. Without consulting other interested parties, it would have been very easy to miss what turned out to be a very positive business opportunity. The results have been really pleasing.
The process was both straightforward and complicated (if that’s even possible). As I’ve mentioned before, using a Translation Management Platform like CrowdIn is going to make your life a lot easier, and so it was here — adding the language, onboarding the translators and communication between our team and the translators was all very seamless.
We ran into a roadblock when we got to the activation phase of the process, but with a little creative thinking and teamwork, we came up with a compromise that got the language working for us without having to wait for the blocker to clear. Pipedrive is full of really intelligent and talented colleagues, and working on this project together with so many of them, from Growth to Web and Developers to Marketers, always has me walking away feeling full of gratitude for how lucky I am to work in such a place.
And the results…well, they speak for themselves :-)
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