Silent Notary interview with Enes Özgör, CTO of Langia

TASHA [00:00:04] Hi Enes, the first question was asking if you could talk a little about the challenges that you face in your industry, and in which places can Silent Notary help you solve those issues.

ENES [00:00:22] Yes. So it’s generally our industry, the translatio industry is based on like an old techniques on both certification and like authenticating the translator itself, basically certification of the translator itself. So every time when you want to submit a translated document, both the government or other companies, or the person requesting the translation needs a certification,thats basically a set of documents showing they’re eligible, they have the knowledge, they have the language specifications for the job,or if they don’t have a certification and their translation isn’t acepted or their certification has expired and again, their translation is not accepted. The thing is, the reason this is like this is if your document is fake or if your document has problems, the government or the entity requesting the translation wants to know who done the translation and can they be can they be accountable. Can they be accountable to this document and veryify it contents? And that’s why every time we’re having this problem, like if I couldn’t find a translator for the job because they don’t have the certification up to date or the other part of the requests in place. We are hoping blockchain is the solution for that, if we can somehow implement this into the industry.

TASHA [00:02:39] Do you have a lot of problems with the translation in documents? Do you face it like on a regular basis?

ENES [00:02:48] Yeah, it’s probably 30% to 40% of the time. They need a translator with a specific certification. And if we cannot find this person, a translator fitting to that position, its a major problem. . They say, yeah, they don’t have a knowledgeable translator for that. Also, there is like other parts, which is more like stuff to keep the planet green . Cut down the paper consumption etct. Every time they regress the translation there is like the same amount of pages needs to be printed if they need a certified translation. Because iit requires the stamp and the signature. So the only way you can just fake it if yo if you have the correct software or tools. So you may get a supposed certified translation, but maybe the translators certification expired five years ago, and he’s just using the old one, old stamp and you might not know it.

TASHA [00:04:23] Hmm. So what you mean is that if we have all those so like actually it sounds like a digitalization of all of this. Thats were Silent Notary comes in.

ENES [00:04:38] Absolutely. So there is to there is three sides actually being one to digitalize it all. And the first one, the translator itself, translator itself will be cemented or hashed into the chain when they first start working with you. So this is to certify that they are signed up in that date. They to the this person is the right person. The the person who did the translation and their eligibility or their language futures, if they have couple of years of experience, if they have expertize in specific areas and their I.D., the information also because, you know, this might be a different person than the person who did the translation just using their name. It is not the real person. This could be another method to bypass the authentication process. So when they first sign up, you are going to give them a language certification. Actually, I forget the most important step after they have passed a couple of steps in the system like verification or identity verification, skill set test. You know, not every translator will have that. But if they want to be a certified translation translator here, they will be like blockchain certified . After that process, the second one is document or the project certification. When a customer submits a project, which is a translation project, we just first hash the first source file, the original file, and then the translation is done and the translator completes the translation, the hash, the translated file. So in case like a use case, you like presented these documents, the translated documents to a court and the details of all the information and the files, the court could say there is a mismatch. So are we sure this is the documents or this is a valid translation? So they can go back to the blockchain and see when and by who and if, like this IP address or, you know, hardware address, etc. they uploaded the translation. Or the source file. They can see both and they can say, yeah, so this is the authentic file and there is no changes made after the translation, and they can be sure the customer and translator are not accountable from this point because they did their job and the customer provided the correct file, the translator provided the correct file and this is verified by the blockchain technology. And then they can then say “yesthis is fully certified on blockcahin”. So the, the other party is wrong or I don’t know what is the court case is, but the customer and translator will be verified by this way.

TASHA [00:08:37] Mm hmm. So you were saying about three ways?

ENES [00:08:43] Kind of. Because like if we don’t keep the translators hash like their records. Then the Marine Corps checks the source file and the translated file. There will be only a name about the translator. This translator did this, but we might not know if this name really did the translation. So we will include a translator sort of situation like the address or like the transaction showing the translator and his/her own information. That’s the actually the other step, because if you don’t do this, it’s kind of useless about for the translator side. It can only prove that the file was uploaded. And nothing else. But if you include the translator’s own information with the method, like a blockchain transaction or, you know, information, then they can say yes its all above board. So this is the translator who did this translation and their information is here, like the registration date, you know, the information and others. Not privacy information. generally, these will be only for professionals to see or government agencies to see.

TASHA [00:10:22] So you get get to secure in five block channel three ways it’s the ledger itself himself his certification the the fact of the document translation and the end file.

ENES [00:10:39] Yeah.

TASHA [00:10:40] Okay. Right. Okay. Could you tell me more like how it’s done now before the blockchain?

ENES [00:10:49] So right now we have not we changed the whole language structure, actually keeping the silent majority in mind because the old structure wasn’t an easy system to work on. It wasn’t flexible at all. So the new system is more like the marketplace and the way we handle it right now, we are keeping the translator accountable. We are not getting into between and whatever they put in their profile. When they sign up, it’s their responsibility. And if they say, I am a certified translator. In our specific day, we have probably six or eight different certifications customers are looking for work. If he says, for example, API or translation or certification it, we believe it’s real and we don’t check them. Do you really have the certification? Because if something goes wrong, they are accountable. Their name in their language doesn’t have any legal obligations to provide at the new system. And in this way, we just keep our management costs down or like operations costs down and just giving the rest of the parts to the trust itself and how it’s done. When a customer segments a project,they select the specific certification first because otherwise it will be a normal transition, you know, certification needed. If they select a specific certification, translator accepts and proceeds to the transition, completes all the documents and prepares a two page certification for this set of documents. These two pages includes the translators certified certification information, where he get certification, when did he get it? And other details. And the second page is a contract affidavit of translation. It says, I am the translator who translated this document. And I, I take full responsibility to say I did the translation correctly by understanding, you know, the file that states this, the translator is accountable. Otherwise, if they don’t include this and customer doesn’t know the translator details or things and they submit this translated file to a court or a government agency, the government agency can say, well, this is not a valid translation because you might just do it with a Google translater. Like we don’t see any affidavits, we don’t see any signatures of people. And how do we know this person did this? There is no there is no step. So that’s why these two pages are important.

TASHA [00:14:25] We all actually. Anyway, for me, it sounds like there are so many ways to make a fraudulant certificate.

ENES [00:14:30] Absolutely. There are many ways. And I believe there is a lot out there, you know, because a lot of law firms are really decent. They are trying to do the best practice, keep everything on by the book says. But there are aso a lot of law firms are just going after the money and they don’t care. They can t can use the same certification for every project because there is no sender checked.

ENES [00:15:07] There is no attribute in the certification itself stating which documents they translated. Sometimes they include in the affidavit file names like I translated these file names and something then something and then the PDF. So two pages and if there is any other documents, blah, blah, blah, that’s documents. And I translated this document, it’s stating. But a lot of the times are they don’t care. They just put the certification angle. And that’s why we just wanted to change the whole system to like we did. You should get out of this cycle because we might get in trouble. It should be the translator’s responsibility.

TASHA [00:16:02] Well, yeah, that sounds fair. Well, as long as the world is transforming.

ENES [00:16:13] When I first hear about the Silent Notarys system, we were really thinking about something to do with the blockchain and just. Yeah, it was the perfect thing we were looking for and I hope like it will take some time to agencies or the government to accept blockchain certification, but eventually it will happen. And I believe if we can, you know, adopt it earlier, I believe it will be it will be the probably best system for a long while.

TASHA [00:16:46] Then it will be the driver of the market for sure.

ENES [00:16:49] Yeah.

TASHA [00:16:50] Yeah. That sounds really cool. Could you also tell me a little bit more about Langia as a company itself?

ENES [00:17:00] So when you had right now, I think four or five years of experience in the industry. And we tried a lot of new things to make the industry, like modernized. But there is a lot of lets say concrete beliefs or concrete practices are hard to change. And that’s why we sometimes go back and use some of the old techniques, as I mentioned, about certification, etc.. But a lot of the times we always had a problem with the old system,people are used to the old ways . So this is the new way. We are handling it like this. And they were just, you know, people didn’t believe or like didn’t get onboard. And, like, immediately they were keeping themselves back a little because, you know, technology is always kind of scary for some people if they don’t know it. So after the first two years, we kind of came to a middle ground between the new systems and the old ones had like probably lots of little firm customers, big partners. They had like, I don’t know, thousands of dollars of jobs and yearly they had a lot of clients and then COVID hit. So after the COVID, we had a lot of troubles finding the traction because of the whole immigration stop. And we wanted to find other ways to get customers in. And this solution was the final version of land is right now, which is as a company, we’re just providing the most improved like most advanced and the base structures to translators so they can create their own profiles as a professional, put their like all of their credentials experiences expertize and they need for customers to come in and send them a project, send them a job. It’s like an open marketplace. And the previous systems were not so efficient. If we keep that, it’s like another marketplace but a, you know, a service provider and we’re in the middle. When someone submits a project, we always check it and assign it to a translator. It was like an agency it doesn’t like it wasn’t different. So that’s why the marketplace with regulations, which means like the quality regulations, like not every everyone can be a professional or a certified translator in the system and for the customers. Other options in the industry either. It’s a transportation agency with a lot of overhead costs. When they submit a project, only 40% goes to the translator. The rest is going to the agency itself. So it’s like it’s not good for the customer itself. And the other option is finding a freelance translator from the marketplace like, I don’t know, Kijiji or fewer, or there’s a couple of other websites changing major countries. This is risky because you don’t know the quality and they can just you know, they might not fulfill your needs. They can just bail out or take the money or half of the money and you won’t see them again. And our role in here is now not an unregulated marketplace. So when something goes wrong, you know, the translators contact information, we know their profile, we know who they are. And if something goes wrong on the customer side, again, we can just dial in what’s going on. You need to like, this is the thing you need to do. You shouldn’t do this kind of check out and see how to solve the problem. And I believe with the inclusion, inclusion of the blockchain or digital certification. There won’t be any need to keep track of anything manual or anything printed, because right now there’s also a printed side, as I mentioned. Mm hmm. Things should go traditionally for a while, but after the digitalization of certification, it will be probably a global, global solution, because everyone can, like any translator, can create an account. They will be certified. And customers should trust them because they’re certified in our system also. As a translator, as industry translator aside. When they work with another company, generally their payouts and other details are getting in. It’s not seamless for a lot of them. Generally, it’s a manual process. But for the last two years, I’m I was trying to find a solution to solve this problem. And finally, we have an automated system right now. It’s just like a like Uber marketplace. Whatever you do, whatever you complete as a translator, the translation project, you are automatically. You can manually or automatically pay it like check it out. Cash out, cash out the amount in the system to your specific bank account or whatever you wherever you want to, what you want. It can be used stripe’s make your own system for that. And the thing is, everything is secure. You don’t have to deal with the payment system. Security’s actually that works. That’s also the thing I was waiting for to implement the scenario, because if you don’t have a robust payment system, then the whole process can be a little. I can’t optimize because we want to make sure the payments are in place before the documents or chance data gets into the blockchain. As a transaction, there might not be anything that didn’t get paid and it’s just hashed. We used the network and you know, there’s an extra something because we didn’t have a perfect payment system, etc.. There is a lot of, you know, simple or I get this kind of difference and points. So after everything is almost complete, now we are ready to implement.

TASHA [00:24:57] Right now,are you only procssing the payments in fiat , or are you planning to implement the cryptocurrency transfers?

ENES [00:25:05] Oh yeah. This is another thing. You want it to like include a cryptocurrencies to the check out too. Right now we are using the stripes name of gate and this is because, If they pay, if the customer pays with fiat transfer, it can like Withdraw their money as of yet. So if we use blockchain, there might be a need to make like exchange to from the cryptocurrency to the fiat because it’s translated as pay of should be also in crypto if you want it to you know customer paid you with Ethereum or customer paid you with something else. do you want o withdraw in a digital currency, or do you want to cash out with fiat? So this is only a part of it, but we in the future, we absolutely want to give the option to various crypto.

TASHA [00:26:20] Right now. Sounds very interesting for me. It sounds like Langa is planning to be disruptive company in the by changing all this bureaucratic systems into something really cool.

ENES [00:26:37] It’s the hard part,it can be done because otherwise it wouldn’t work if the government or other entities are not accepting the certification or the crypto I mean blockchain certification, then we might not do anything else. It’s because it’s something that they can just say, yeah, we don’t accept it.

TASHA [00:27:02] Yeah. And the tricky part of this because the government, yeah. You know they, they love their paper pay.

ENES [00:27:10] Well absolutely. Yeah.

TASHA [00:27:12] And they’re really hard to change. Yeah. Well, I mean at the beginning you might be starting from some governments ?

ENES [00:27:19] Yeah, it’s probably Canadian government because they seem they’re more warm about the cryptocurrency or the blockchain. And as I as I remember, they are testing out government IDs in blockchain, like, you know, giving out the people’s ID from the blockchain and keeping maintaining it like this and secure it. It’s it can work, too. I hope they can be like open minded about this.

TASHA [00:27:57] Like, why not? You’re doing IDs. Why not Translation?The industry needs that as well. very cool. I guess that you’ve answered all my questions and make it perfect. I think that maybe I could do later kind of like a podcast out of it and there will be definitely a post on that on our blog. I’m not yet sure which one, but I will send it

ENES [00:28:32] Oh, yeah, sure. Absolutely. We can we can share them too in our blog, too. Or like in social media. So. Thank you very.