Sonia Kampshoff

Today my guest on the podcast is Elizabeth Prokorny, who is the head of content and brand at Weglot. Hello, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Pokorny

Hi, Sonia. Thanks for having me today.

Sonia Kampshoff

It's a pleasure to have you here. When I started, when I had the idea for the podcast, I knew I wanted to talk to someone at Weglot because I think that the work you do is so interesting in merging languages and technology and AI. And it's so modern and future facing. So I'm very happy to have you here today.

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, me too.

Sonia Kampshoff

As you know, the question is always the same for everyone. So what's your favourite word or phrase in a language that you speak?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yes, so I've approached this slightly differently. And I'm comparing English with French, which is the second language I speak and continue to learn to speak. And my comment is more on how, well, maybe one could say French is slightly richer in that there's extra words that we don't have. And in English, we sort of have the tone to convey the message.

So the way I describe it to my family when I'm saying the very same thing I'm saying now is if you were to miss a bus, you say, thanks to Rachel, I missed the bus. Whereas in French, there's simply two ways to say thanks to, which is negative and positive. So, grâce à, which is like, oh, thanks to so and so, I made the bus. Or, à cause de, is negatively, I didn't make that bus.

So that would be my favourite kind of, not word, yeah, interest with learning two different languages.

Sonia Kampshoff

Yeah, English has that a lot where the intonation and the context actually say what you actually want to say. That's very interesting. That's a good one.

Elizabeth Pokorny

And yeah, I have one more other point, but I'm rambling. One thing I also find really funny about learning French is that many of the verbs are actually the older way we would have spoken in English. So I find myself now in English having quite a formal English because I'm kind of like semi translating what I would say in French back into English.

And yeah I'm always impressing my my mother when I come back with quite a formal use of I posed that question the other day to so and so because you would say that in posé you would say that in French and I'm doing a direct translation the other way so yeah it's interesting speaking different languages and what's going on in your head.

Sonia Kampshoff

So funny. Do you find that it happens to other people around you, native English speakers who learn French and live in France? Is that the same?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yes, yeah, yeah, actually my sister lives in France and I hear the exact same, her doing the exact same thing, so it's just so funny. Yeah, yeah, making this weird. Yeah, just it's a bit jarring, I think, when someone English hears you say that, they're like, what do mean? You posed a question.

Sonia Kampshoff

So you you are British and you grew up in England

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yes, Yeah, from outside, from London, born in London, and then I moved to East Anglia and spent most of my time in Cambridge, Cambridge area. That's where I did my, my high school education. And then, yeah.

Sonia Kampshoff

And then you went to university in Sheffield.

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yes, I discovered the Midlands, north of England and the very lovely people there. Big difference between the south and the north. Although Sheffield would not be considered the north of England, but I suppose to a southerner it is. Yes, I could have stayed there actually, but I graduated.

Well, I went to university in the recession, came out, it was still a bit of a difficult time for job searches, but yeah, eventually found my first job in Harrogate of all places. Small, yeah, small, lovely town and started in PR industry.

Sonia Kampshoff

So when did you start learning languages? Did you start at school or did it come afterwards?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, like all English people, we really struggle with learning languages. I think it's both a blessing and a curse speaking English as your first language. It's not, we don't have that push that other European countries have in learning a second language because we, we simply know most people can understand us when we go on holiday.

So, yeah, I badly learned French at school, decided even though I wasn't doing well at French, I'd suddenly learn Italian. So, I badly learned Italian. And it wasn't until the last, yeah, six, seven years now I've been in France that I actually started officially learning a language, being French.

Sonia Kampshoff

So if we go back a step, so when you finished university and you did your master's as well in Sheffield, you first moved to the Netherlands, didn't you?

Elizabeth Pokorny

A lot of the jobs required Dutch and it's, yeah, quite complex language, so I wasn't able to learn that and look for a job. So I stumbled across a company that was an international market research association and ended up in a very international environment there.

Sonia Kampshoff: How many people?

Elizabeth Prokorny: We were about 60 people and we were around 15 different nationalities. So it was a really rich environment dealing with, I mean, that was my first international experience in the job market. And it was really interesting working with people from all different cultures. That's when you really kind of understand that your way is not the only way and having to be kind of sensitive to different people’s needs in a meeting, even just the working styles of how people work.

Even the way I spoke English, it wasn't an international company, so the company language was English. But even understanding that the way I speak, even though everyone understands English, doesn't mean they understand an English speaker. And I really see that now living outside of England. Maybe you see that in London as well.

English people have a very specific way of speaking and we speak very fast and we don't hold back on using idioms. I think we're massive idiom users and we don't consider for a minute that our idiom is not translatable. So yeah, after having many people be confused with how I spoke, I quickly realized I need to remove that part of my, of English from, from my everyday.

Sonia Kampshoff

And so you went from PR in Harrogate and you went into market research in the Netherlands. Was that an easy transition or did you, how did you find it?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah. So, so actually first when I was in a hurry, I quickly switched from PR cause it wasn't really for me. Um, even though I did my masters in it and I moved into another company to do marketing and then, um, yeah, the switch to the Netherlands, was a market research association, but I was still in the marketing team. Um, so yeah, it was just, it was quite, um, different. Like I say, working with, uh, people that weren't from your home countries is always interesting.

Trying to understand different ways you can collaborate with people. Yeah, I loved it actually. That's when I kind of quickly felt that, very comfortable working in an international environment. It's much more challenging because you're, especially you're marketing to different markets. So not only are you internally working with teammates from all around the world. You're also trying to deliver messages that everyone can understand when English isn't everybody's first language that you're marketing to.

So yeah, it was a really great experience. I was there for four years, I think, yeah, four years in the Netherlands.

Sonia Kampshoff

And now you live in Paris and work at Weglot. You've been there for a few years, I think six and a half years.

Elizabeth Pokorny

That's six and a half years now. Yeah. And I think everything that my whole experience in the Netherlands definitely prepared me for this track, this move into a French company. Understanding quite quickly that your way of working is not the same in a different country.

And especially in France, I would say that personally, for my opinion, I'm not saying it's for everybody, but there's very different styles of feedback and praise in France compared to England. In England, you sort of receive regular feedback. And I would say being in that international environment in the Netherlands was quite similar. You know if you're doing a good job, you know if you're doing a bad job.

In France, it's very much no news is good news. There's not this big, great job. That worked really well. This is why it's very level. Yeah, so that was a quick learning to adjust to.

Sonia Kampshoff

Interesting. Do you want to say a little bit about what Weglot does for listeners who are not familiar with the company?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah. So, Weglot is a website translation tool. So, we're both the technology side and the language side. So, one of the big complexities of translating a website is not just the words, it's also how you're going to display that website. How are you going to set up the SEO? How are you going to do your URL structure? So, Weglot handles all of that.

And we do the translation part using AI translation. We also have an AI language model, which is built in with Gemini and ChatGPT. And it then further improves those AI translations based on your brand guidelines, your tone of voice, your glossary edits, manual edits. And then on top of that, there's always the human editing element. So you can do very intense content localization, or you can choose to let it stay AI translated.

So yeah, we tackled both sides of website translation.

Sonia Kampshoff

And who are your clients? Are they large companies or do you work across industries or do you have specific industries?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah. We really work across every industry from e-commerce, which, you know, lot of companies are selling internationally more so than ever. Business services, SaaS tools, we got ourselves, we are a great representation of a company that can add a lot of languages to their website and sell internationally, but simply because our technology doesn't need to be translated. It's a tool. You just install it and it does what you need it to do.

So we have a lot of business services and SAS tools. We have a lot of government, especially in the US, such a large country where Spanish is widely spoken. We have a lot of government institutions that add multiple languages depending on in that state what languages are spoken alongside English.

Hospitality is also a big one. A lot of hotels, a lot of restaurants. So yeah, I mean, adding language, nobody likes turning up on a website and having to use the Google browser to get some bad translations of, when you're on holiday looking for a hotel or, yeah, so really, really expensive from huge companies. IBM, we have Spotify, we have...

HBO, to yet smaller one businesses, portfolios. Yeah, really a range of clients and businesses and industry. So it makes it very interesting and a difficult challenge for marketing because you have so many pockets of personas that you can target that you really have to kind of hone in on a couple to make sure you're not just distributing a very wide and general message.

Sonia Kampshoff

So interesting. So when you look at a website, so there's, you know, all the copy, the text that you see when you get on the website. And then for e-commerce, you have a lot of product titles and product descriptions and so on. But then there's also the whole SEO part. So can you explain a little bit more, for example, how you deal with the SEO?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, so we've got handles all of the technical elements of multilingual SEO. So that includes adding hreflang tags into your source code. So these are very important tags that are very technical to add manually. And they tell Google search bots or search engine bots what language your page is actually targeting.

Because obviously one of the big fears is that when you translate your website, you're duplicating everything. So how is Google going to index you? So this is what helps that URL structure is also really important, whether you choose to have language subdirectories or subdomains. So Weglot handles that. You can choose either. You can also translate your URLs with Weglot.

So when a French person is visiting your store in French, they're also seeing all of the URLs in French, which obviously gives a more localized experience. And then we translate even the bits you can't see. So the metadata, that's all translated with Weglot. So you can go in and you can edit that yourself. And yeah, like I said, at the beginning, the key part with Weglot, you have all this AI translation, which gives you the speed, the instant impact you can choose to launch with that, or you can go in and hone that with content localization.

So you can work with the SEO freelancer in your target market who can help you really find the right keywords for that market because the direct translation, of course, it's not always going to be the exact same keyword.

You can even see that with English versus American English, you've got sneakers and trainers. You couldn't have an e-comm site in English, British English, ranking well in the States because we simply just don't have the same search terms. So yeah, you can do all that with Weglot.

Sonia Kampshoff

So companies do also, they use a different type of English, they build a website for British English and one for American English. Very interesting. That makes absolute sense.

Yeah, and I found it very interesting. I find that quite often companies forget that the URL is also important for SEO, having the right keywords in there. And as you mentioned duplicate content, Google doesn't like that because it likes unique content. That's also something that can be difficult to identify and rectify.

And it sounds good that you have the tools to say, here's duplicate content, how can I change it around, make it unique. Very interesting. And then you do also have sort of a terminology database where people can make sure that the words that they use are there specifically for their company.

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, exactly. We have a glossary so you can many times you don't want certain words translated into the language. For example, on our French, well, all our language websites, we want to keep the names of our plans the same. So, starter, business, advanced. But clearly these are words that are translatable. So, you would add these into your glossary. So, they never got translated. So, there was no lost context.

Maybe you have specific product names that just you don't want translated. Or you have a translation in a certain word that would be too long. And you want to always ensure it's a different, the other version of that word, for example. Yeah. So customers can, can create those straight into inside Weglot.

Sonia Kampshoff

Interesting. So that makes the whole translation of our website so much quicker, doesn't it?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, exactly. And also one of the biggest pain points for a lot of our customers is that they're updating, especially in an e-commerce situation, you're updating and adding new products daily. So when you have to add in a manual workflow and manually translate these things, it becomes almost impossible and you can't really catch up with the products you're pushing out.

Weglot automatically detects any new content and it's also automatically pushed live without you having to do anything. So that's something that customers really, really value at Weglot. And just these kinds of things that not everyone thinks about until they're in it.

And they're like, okay, how would I do that manually? It would just be impossible to send files back and forth. It would stop my product launch in a certain country if I couldn't have those translations back within a day and so on.

Sonia Kampshoff

Yeah, but then at the end also, you mentioned that companies also work with language specialists to double check everything.

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah. Yeah. And because you can just add these straight onto the Weglot platform, for instance, it's how we do some of our own content localization. We're happy to go live with AI translation. We might see how this page performs, or if it's a key product page, we're like, okay, let's straight away notify our content localization freelancer in Germany to go in and make those changes.

So we're really on point with this page because we know it's a high conversion page, but then we've got another blog that didn't really, it isn't really getting much traction. Let's just leave it as an AI translation. It's being able to have the balance of where you put your resources in on key pages because again, I always use Weglot as an example because we do our own, we're obviously using Weglot on Weglot.

We have 800,000 words on our website. If you want to, yeah, if you want to manually, we just have a huge rich blog guide, all this kind of huge content. Approaching that from day one with content localization would just be absolutely unmanageable. So we kind of split this into like, okay, let's look at our top pages and then let's go down to keep going down the priority list. And then add in the content localization when you think it needs to be done. You don't have to do everything perfect at the first step. You can build, you can see what pages get traction in your new markets. And then, yeah, enlist the kind of expert help.

Sonia Kampshoff

How many languages is the Weglot website available in?

Elizabeth Pokorny

I think we have about 15 now. I know that sounds terrible that I don't technically know, it's because we just actually added quite a few new languages. We were seeing, we were getting visits of those languages already. So we wanted to serve those customers. But we started off with original English website, even though it was a French startup.

Then we always had French. Then we added Germany, which is another big market for us, and Spanish. Sorry, Spanish before German, actually. And then we added Dutch, which was interestingly another market for us. And then, yeah, we quickly scaled to an additional 10 or so languages now. Sorry, we had Italian as well.

Yeah, so a lot of languages and we really focus our main efforts on kind of the core five, as I said, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian and the rest we're quite happy to go with AI. And then if we ever got feedback from a customer or a web agency, then that's when we would again add in the localization aspect.

Sonia Kampshoff

How do you decide when to add a new language and which one? Do you get requests from clients or do your own market research?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, like I said, it's more when we start seeing visits from that country and it becomes more significant than we think. Let's add it and see and then refine if we need to refine. And that's how a lot of our customers work actually. They'll kind of have their core markets. And that's sort of another benefit of Weglot is that it's very easy to test, you know, I'm going to go live with Spanish.

I'm not going to put efforts in right now. I'm going to rely on the AI translation, the language model, get it to a quality where I think it's okay. I'm happy to launch. If we're going to continue with that expansion, then let's put in the efforts and get it to the brand kind of quality we want to put out in that market.

Sonia Kampshoff

Very interesting. When it comes to Weglot as a company, do you have developers and linguists and marketing and brand people? How is it structured?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, so we have a marketing team, a sales team, a dev team, a support team. All our support is in-house. I think that's quite unusual for this market. Yeah, all of our support teams here. And then we obviously have an HR, finance, human resources team. Yeah, and we're...

Sonia Kampshoff

Yes.

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, like I say, we're a French based company, but we still have around, I was trying to count them this morning. We came to about nine, nine different nationalities for a company of, we're 65, 65 people. As I say, a French startup, so it's, it's pretty, pretty good that we, have that many nationalities. And we also have a very good gender split for a tech company.

We're about 40 % women, a lot in the product team. Sorry, I completely missed the product team. We have a dev and a product team. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really interesting.

Sonia Kampshoff

Is the company, is the working language, the internal company language, is it English or French or both?

Elizabeth Pokorny

It's actually a bit of both. I would say predominantly French. So we're a startup, so naturally we use Slack. So most of the language spoken on Slack is in French. It depends from team to team. For marketing, for example, because our marketing language is English redominantly, obviously we have many initiatives in France, in Germany. We don't have any German speakers in the marketing team.

We would kind of adapt based on the language of the meeting would be what the language of the, if it's a French initiative, then we're mainly going to be speaking in French. If it's an English initiative, we're mainly going to be speaking in English because it just makes sense when you're trying to market in that language, you need to be discussing how you're going to be marketing in the language that you're going to be marketing in. That's what we've kind of felt makes the most sense.

Sonia Kampshoff

Absolutely. Do you actually employ linguists to go over the translations or is that inside the product and dev team?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, yeah. It's inside the product so you can choose to add a professional translation. We've just now launched an international experts directory on the Weglot website so you can do that exactly. You can find a linguist in that country, an SEO specialist from Germany. You can find that in the directory.

So yeah, we don't directly employ those people, but we're trying to build like a database for people to be able to find that sort of expertise outside of the Weglot dashboard. Because within the Weglot dashboard, it's very much a professional translation. They're not thinking about your SEO strategy.

And we actually took that from one of our customers. They came to us, we were doing a case study with them and they said, actually, we don't hire linguists, we hire an SEO expert from that country. So they're not only translating your content from an improved linguistic point of view, but they're also ensuring that your SEO is on point for that country. That sort of started our own journey on using multilingual SEO experts.

Sonia Kampshoff

That's great, a client giving you a really good idea. Do you have any other examples of clients requesting anything specific, any features?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yes, more on the SEO. That's, as I mentioned, we have the technical aspects, but yeah, people kind of have given us the product feedback to do, to have more inbuilt SEO tools within the dashboard. For example, as I said, there's not always a direct translation of a keyword. I mean, I know the whole world of SEO is changing, so we probably won't always be looking at this aspect of keywords with the NLMs and people searching in that respect.

But yeah, there are people looking for a way to have, you know, an ahref, a SEMRush inbuilt within Weglot. So you can see the most, the highest volume keyword for your market. And yeah, these are the kinds of things that we are looking into and we will have new announcements next year. We're always taking on this kind of feedback to give that kind of richer tool that goes beyond translation because that's often a misconception with Weglot, like, oh, you just do the translation. It's like, absolutely not. One of the hardest things about multilingual websites, the technical setup, the technical displaying. Of course you could, if you wanted to put 800,000 words in Google Translate, but good luck with putting that back on your site. So yeah.

Sonia Kampshoff

Yeah, remember at some point, a couple of years ago, I worked on a project where I was the only German speaker and we were producing a website in German and, you know, classic examples of a really long German word going to the next line in the wrong way or at the wrong point or a long sentence where half the sentence was missing. But if you don't speak the language, you don't notice or you know, things like this and it's not a straightforward translation when you translate a website and it goes from, you know, how it looks on the screen, but also does it make sense in that context and of course, all the SEO side of it.

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, exactly. And even going down to things like, do you want to do the formal or informal tone in French and Spanish? These are brand decisions. I remember our SEO freelancer in Spain, he was very much like, if you went with the formal use of the language, it would be weird for a tech company.

Sonia Kampshoff

Yes.

Elizabeth Pokorny

That's not how tech companies speak in Spain. So yes, all these kind of nuances that you don't always consider when translating a work of art.

Sonia Kampshoff

Yeah, also in German and Italian, my languages, there is formal and informal and this, I always have a conversation with clients who are only or mainly English speaking. You know, you have to decide, either of you have already taken a decision and we go with it and then sometimes you have to adjust the translation because, you know, it went in the other direction. But very often at the beginning, you have to decide, you know, what's your tone of voice, what, how do you want to sound like?

And that will inform the decision whether to use the informal or the formal. Very often tech is more like the modern language and mostly it's informal, but there are a lot of areas, a lot of industries where it makes sense that everything is a bit more formal, especially the regulated industries, you know, everything tends to be formal.

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yes, true. Yeah, exactly.

Sonia Kampshoff

What are the company plans for next year? You mentioned that you're developing more tools or further developing the existing tools for SEO. Are there any other developments that you would like or can talk about?

Elizabeth Pokorny

Yeah, can I talk about it? Things coming next year. Yeah, we're working a lot within the product. We're really going to see very big changes next year, but yeah, it's a bit too soon for us to announce things. But I will just say that kind of the big developments we made this year with our AI translation model fine tuning and improving your AI translations with prompting, with your guidelines, with your brand voice, with custom instructions. That's really going to continue to be very central with Weglot and as always, always with the human editing aspects and no one needs to be like, AI is taking over things, we can't change it. Yeah, that's kind of what we're moving towards.

So it's going to be nice definitely very interesting for the marketing team and we've a lot planned for Yeah, four 10 years for new initiatives Something that we always want to continue to ensure is that we got is also a guide in helping companies go international and we've already started a lot of specific events.

We have an event called NextMarket Live, which looks at a real country focus and how you can enter that market. So next year, we're sort of developing that side of things as well. It's not just the product, it's also how we help customers with this knowledge and expert advice that people are looking for.

Sonia Kampshoff

Brilliant. Well, that's all I really wanted to ask you and talk about. So thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's been a really, really a pleasure to have you on.