#258 Outdoor and Action Sports as a Growth Market for Localization with Martina Russo

0:00When we're talking about the outdoor industry, we think that it's a niche, right? Like it looks like it's a niche, but then if you look at each sports individually, completely different world.

0:12Martina Russo:Hey everyone, welcome to SlaterPod. Today on the podcast, we welcome Martina Russo. She is the CEO of Language Solutions Integrator, the Action Sports Translator, and they have a rare focus on action sports, the outdoor sports industry. Hi Martina, thanks so much for joining today. Hi, and thank you so much for having me. What part of the world are you recording this from today? From some outdoor Mecca or? I am actually. Couldn't you ask? Because I do move around quite a lot and I am in France around the Annecy Chambery area for a few weeks. For a few weeks. Doing any action sports there or just working?

0:51Yeah. Well, it's mostly mountain biking because I only have a couple of weeks here, but yeah.

0:55Martina Russo:Mountain bike. So that's your kind of outdoor sports of choice, or do you do anything else in that area? Not really. That's actually my most recent passion because I picked it up last year. But I have been snowboarding and skiing actually since I was like three years old. So that's kind of my main thing has been. And also I have been climbing for maybe, I don't know, eight, seven, eight years at this point. So that's kind of my two main things. And then I picked up mountain biking last year. And I've done, of course, a bunch of different sports as well, you know, kite surfing, surfing, but that's my main focus.

1:31Martina Russo:Okay. So we're going to have to dwell on this for a second. So snowboarding or skiing or both? Or which one do you prefer? I started skiing when I was three years old because, you know, at the time, snowboarding wasn't that popular even at all. So I started skiing and then when I was maybe 16 or 17, I switched to snowboarding and then I kind of never went back to skiing. I kind of switched to the dark side and never went back. Usually the journey is like ski, snowboard, and then back to ski when the knees are kind of wearing out. So, yeah, I'm still a snowboarder. I started with skiing when I was a kid.

2:05Martina Russo:I did snowboarding and never came back. I don't think I can ski, actually. All right. So, we solved that. Great. And then the climbing. So, actual like mountain climbing, like with ropes and all of that? Yeah. I don't know how familiar you are with the different types of climbing, but I started sport climbing and bouldering. I don't know if you know. Yeah. Okay. Bouldering. Okay. Great. But then sport climbing is when you go to the crag. I'm going to get really, really technical now, but basically you do, yeah, maybe anywhere between 20, 40 meters of, we call it single pitch. So you have protection in the wall and you go up with the rope and then, yeah, I'm getting really technical now.

2:48But basically, it's pre-protected, but then you have to put the rope into the wall as you go up. And so, that's what I do mostly, most of the time.

2:56Martina Russo:I have so much admiration for you people. I could not do this. This is crazy. All right, let's go back to business. So, I looked at your LinkedIn page. You've done a lot in the language space. So, tell us a bit more about the professional side, the entrepreneurial side, and how this all got started. Yeah, sure. So, I did start as a translator, as a freelance translator when I was, I don't know, 20. As soon as I started university, I did study languages translation. Then I already started working in translation. And then a few years in, I got a bunch of, you know, how a lot of people start agencies.

3:27I got a bunch of clients who wanted support in a bunch of different languages. And so at the time, and this is maybe eight, nine years ago now or more, maybe more. And so I started offering translation services like as a, you know, small boutique LSP where I was the main project manager. and then it grew to add a few project managers and that was, you might see, moving words, which is SaaS localization. And then six and a half years ago, I started the Action Sports Translator, which is what I focus on pretty much 100 % now. And yeah, as a consumer of other sports and as a language translation professional who already had an agency, started an agency, I thought, you know, We need to solve the issue that is plaguing the other industry when it comes to translation of multilingual content.

4:19And so that's what I did.

4:20Martina Russo:So now you're still running both? You're still involved in both? Or does one absorb more focus than the other? I'm running both. But with SaaS localization, at some point, TA, I cannot even say the acronym, but TAF, the Action Sports Translator, it exploded really quickly. And so I decided to put all of my focus on it. And then with Moving Words, we still have some clients, but we don't actually go after new ones. And we actually have a network of other language solutions integrators, other agencies that we work with. Then we actually refer depending on who we think is the best fit. And so the idea of focusing on that particular segment was that like you had this passion obviously for outdoor sports and then was it a conscious decision like, well, this is what I would really want to focus on or did you get some projects and then you felt like, well, I'm kind of the only one that can really do justice to these types of texts or where did you get traction from this?

5:28Martina Russo:Was it more of a like, okay, we have the business plan and now let's go after it or did you kind of stumble into it and then it just took off very quickly? So I didn't really have any grand plans for it. It was more like, you know, I'm a user of this product. I'm a user of this brand. I spend all of my free time and sometimes even my work time. I take my laptop to the crack when I'm climbing, you know? So I buy this gear and I was, because I'm Italian, I'm always, and I'm connecting from many different countries. I'm always getting redirected onto all of these different versions of the brand's websites.

6:00and also I do get to see the marketing materials into a bunch of languages. And I was horrified at what I was seeing. And I thought, you know what, let me just do something about this. And actually then it happened that I was stuck at home with a minor foot injury, surgery, sorry. And so I was injured and I couldn't walk. And then I found out that it was going to be a trade show a few weeks later. And I thought, let me put this time to good use. Let me try to come up with something, do a proof of concept and just go to the straight show and then it just like snowballed and exploded from there.

6:34Martina Russo:I love it. That's so cool. So what are some of the unique challenges when you're in this, you know, action sports, outdoor, working with outdoor brands versus maybe more of the, I don't know, maybe the drier kind of, you know, areas, you know, I don't know, banking, legal, finance, all of this type of stuff. Is there anything somewhat unique about this? So you said you're a snowboard, right? Yeah, I do a bunch of stuff. But yeah, snowboard, skateboard, all of that. Actually, let me take us to the back. When we're talking about the outdoor industry, we think that it's a niche, right? Like it looks like it's a niche.

7:06But then if you look at each sport individually, completely different world, right? Maybe there is some overlap within board sports, for example, you know, skateboarding, snowboarding, surf maybe. But then the culture is completely unique to each one of those sports. And then not only that, but when we're looking at the sports individually, then you have sub-verticals within those sports. So if you're looking at cycling, you have road cycling, you have gravel, you have mountain biking. When you look at the mountain biking, you have multiple disciplines within mountain biking. Climbing, you've got bouldering, tread, port, alpine, all of that stuff.

7:38So that's the first challenge. It's very difficult to, you know, sort of specialize. Sometimes even within the same sports, you have got so many different disciplines. And so all of these disciplines have got their own culture, they've got their own lingo. and so that's very peculiar about this industry and then what why that's also peculiar and why it's challenging is because all of those brands needs to have the authenticity and that's very unique i think in the other industry like when you want to purchase and buy from a brand you become you know there is a word which is outdoor sports fans and enthusiasts and that tells you everything that you need to know about his industry.

8:20You need to be in the industry yourself to be able to, and in those sports, yeah, to basically help those brands stay authentic. So that's the main thing I would say.

8:32Martina Russo:Yeah, you're right. There's like so many subcultures and I mean, yeah, I mean, I just said I'm skateboarding so much. I mean, I'm getting a little old for it, but like, especially for skateboarding, but there's this whole like, you know, 90s skateboarding guys that are still kind of trying it. So I guess that's why I'm still a bit involved. But I want to talk about terminology which kind of speaks to that niche topic and that subculture topic you talk about. So a lot of these sports are very kind of Anglo-centric, English-centric. I mean, just think about all the lingo in skateboarding, snowboarding, all the tricks, I don't think there's a German word for like, I don't know, McTwist, like all these, even like in 1200 or something like that, all these tricks or just English, or I used to follow ultra running, like ultra marathon, like also the terminology there.

9:25Martina Russo:I don't think there's a ton of terminology there in German either, and maybe in bouldering, like you just very fluently use some of these terms in English. Maybe, is there like an Italian word for bouldering, for example? So I guess it's a long way of saying like how would you agree that there's a very kind of English dominant side to these sports and then like to what level do the local languages, do the other languages kind of adjust or not to it? So what we love to say in translation and localization history is it depends. So it depends on the sports and depends on where the sports was developed or, you know, got the most influence.

10:04If you look at climbing, you know, it started probably like in the 70s or so like in the US, but in parallel it started or maybe even earlier. um probably like yeah some even decades earlier in europe so and in parallel we have these sort of movements and also they're quite they're quite different you know to what was happening in the u.s where you have the term dirtbag i don't know if anyone familiar with climbing was listening to it we know what i'm talking about um which originates uh from the u.s and like yosemite and why you it was like a something that you aspire to be a dirtbag but then in europe we have very different types of mountains and it's you know in parallel it's developing and we've got very very local ways of saying the same thing and even if you look at i know i'm italian so i can tell you i learned to climb in italy um so i learned all the terminology and even if you look at a country you have multiple ways of calling a single hold you know like a jug which is a climbing type of climbing hold just in italian i can find i don't know six different ways of calling it so yes but then when you look at um sports like snowboarding or skateboarding, you're right.

11:13That's, you know, that was weight or surfing that's been popular for much longer than climbing. Climbing just got into Olympics, you know, recently, but then snowboarding and skiing that's been for a long time. And so that also shaped how, and also it became more popular in different regions. So that also shaped a lot how some of that terminology. And so we do use that. A lot of the terminology in English, we keep it in a lot of the translations and the company. And yeah.

11:39Martina Russo:It must be very hard to find good translators, good linguists for this. Because I mean, like how, yeah, finding somebody who's like familiar with, I don't know, just the skateboarding terminology and like, you know, transferring it in a cool, insidery kind of appropriate way into, I mean, like again, German, like half of it would just be English. So, and like balancing it, like making it not English, but obviously, but like having all these terms that would never be translated, kept in German would be tough. Yeah, but also you need to think about each language. Like if you think about French and Spanish where they don't translate stuff, sorry, they don't want to keep anything in English, or you can go even more granular and you can look at the difference between Swiss Italian and Italian, where Italians, we love to throw English words everywhere.

12:28It's ridiculous. But then you look at Swiss Italian and don't like to use English words. So each market has its own peculiarity or peculiarities. And yeah, it takes, and now when you look at copy, even like product copy, it's always a mix of super technical copy, but also a mix of marketing and storytelling. And so it takes, you know, a fine sort of, yeah, working on a fine line.

12:53Martina Russo:Well, hence the need for a company like yours, right? Because I mean, somebody needs to figure this out. So also something that we came across when we did some research, like you're avoiding like maybe some other sports, mainstream sports like football, tennis, and golf. Like, why is that? I mean, wouldn't that be a huge market also with football becoming even more popular than it's been? Yeah, I mean, it would be, but that's kind of not the core of what we do. You know, every single process within our company is tailored to solve the very specific challenges of outdoor sports brands. and those are quite different from mainstream sports.

13:31So we can, of course, we could. We do get inquiries from golf companies, golf brands or different types of sports. But again, we have a network of partners that we think are more suitable for that type of brand and then we refer them. We just like to keep our core focus on the outdoor and action sports industry.

13:53Martina Russo:That's so cool. Very deliberate. I mean, then, yeah, I guess this is a niche. I guess you don't have too many competitors who are at that level, especially if you're saying like it's not sports as a general, like you're really focusing on that niche. We have to talk about AI. Everybody has to talk about AI. Of course. Have to talk about AI. You do human expert in the loop. You do AI. In your space, where are there areas where, you know, you obviously work with human experts and where are there opportunities to just deploy AI and how do you do that? How do you balance that? We do a bunch of stuff with AI.

14:33I like to say that we've got three buckets with AI. One is like the agency company side, internal operational side. So that's like, you know, we have our own internal AI program and that's, you know, just, I mean, that's developed to speed up processes and make things more efficient and just be competitive in the sense that, you know, help people with decision making and, you know, blah, blah, blah, all of that. Then we have the content creation and copywriting because we also help brands create copy from scratch and typically in English, but also different languages. And then we localize it. So we also help with, yeah, we also leverage AI there.

15:08And then we, you know, the AI in localization, which is a very different beast because in localization, we have all these different technologies which are so niche and they're so specific and they're so elaborate and evolve. and so of course you know we use different TMSs and but then we also we obviously have access to their solution the AI solutions that come with them but also we have we are developing our own yeah our own solutions which yeah basically connect also leverage what the TMS infrastructure let's say.

15:42Martina Russo:So are there like some high volume areas where AI would just be enough? Are there pockets within the action sports industry where there's like some just massive repository of content that you could just use AI on or is it all? I mean, you said there's two components, right? There's the technical part and the more marketing part, but then maybe in the technical part, are there pockets of high volumes or they're not really? Yeah. I mean, the product copy, we're talking about hundreds and maybe thousands of products per year. So, but the thing is that everything is typically very, very marketing oriented it and there so we do i mean this is the easiest um okay let me take us to back the most of the work that we do is creative marketing transcreation um so we are testing it right now we are testing ai against those types of projects as well um but definitely the like our clients are after you know the super authentic super you know i'm going to use the word high quality even though we all know that quality has got different minutes and criteria, but super, yeah, let's say authentic experiences for the consumers.

16:50And so a lot of what we do is that. And so the easier, let's say the lowest or lower hanging fruit for AI implementation is product copy. However, we wouldn't necessarily not have, you know, a human layer at this point anyway. And also other stuff like FAQs or all that sort of more less cognitive content, that's definitely something where we can leverage AI a lot more. And with our client, it hasn't really come up that they don't want to have like a review from the human experts so far.

17:29Martina Russo:In the mainstream world, there's things like the Olympics or the World Cup or things like that. In the outdoor sports, I mean, are there any major events? I mean, the areas that I know, like UTMB for ultra marathon or X Games or something, is that something that influences your volumes? When does kind of the localization for these types of events start? What events are you kind of focusing on? Yeah, I mean, again, here it's a long list of events, but of course, you mentioned the UTMB, so all these really big ones. you know in surfing as well the the world surf cup i don't surf actually so i don't even know the exact name of it but all these like bigger events um typically what happens is that the brands need to have some campaign copy which is relevant and so we're talking about trans creations um and more yeah very high impact copy that sometimes get printed or you know big focus on their home page and maybe it's also connected to a collection so these usually well these usually starts to get prepared quite a long time in advance but as it hope like often happens with localization the localization part doesn't get pushed a bit like last minute so it's always like you know oh a new department requests something and this other department requests something else and and the localization maturity within outdoor sports brands are usually quite low so it's i think a lot of the work that we do is very process driven as well like we have to help brands go from where they are to a more sustainable setup that makes more sense with the goals that they want to achieve.

19:04And so, yeah, that's a lot of the work that happens around campaigns, campaign work, also propelled sort of by those types of events.

19:13Martina Russo:So like the classic from spreadsheet to some type of TMS, some type of language tech platform, huh? Yeah. So do you work, like when we say the outdoor industry, I mean, or lifestyle, right? We're probably typically thinking about brands like Solomon or whatever, Burton or something. But I think we came across a client of yours called Skullcandy, which is headphones, right? So for action sports. So is there a broader ecosystem of companies you're servicing, not just the actual brands that do the, I don't know, the sports gear, but maybe headphones. Is there other examples like this? And to be fair, that's one of the only, probably the only sort of, yeah, brand that we work with, which is not strictly like either a manufacturer of the, we call them like soft goods or hard goods.

20:02So soft goods would be like clothing and gears and accessories. And then you've got hard goods, which is, I don't know, the skis, the surfboards, the snowboards. So, you know, so typically we work with these two types, but also we work with digital interfaces. So think about apps that you use to, I don't know, record your outing or yeah. So like apps basically. Yeah. Yeah. Like Strava, Camus, these types of companies.

20:29Martina Russo:And then the way these brands obviously sell their products, a ton of it is e-commerce, right? So I guess they're heavy users of like Shopify or Amazon. Are you localizing on these platforms I would assume as well and you know, that adds to the complexity? Yeah. I mean, anyone who's ever done any Shopify localization will know what a pain it is. I actually used to work That's a good quote Yes It is I mean I'm downplaying it as well I used to work with Shopify So I'm very familiar with them As an ecosystem I used to be You know I worked with their content team I was internal to A lot of their You know The Shopify ecosystem And A long time ago I also used to run A Shopify store So I'm extremely familiar With the whole Ecosystem Unfortunately Platforms like Shopify And I'm going to make an example Of Shopify But this is often rings true for a lot of those platforms are not really localization friendly and this means that you know you can just there might be a connector and this is true for e-commerce platforms but also content management systems um but yeah it's it's that let's just say that it takes a lot of integrating connecting technology management stakeholder management again remember this especially like outdoor brands that have that like such maturity when it comes to localization So there is also a lot of stakeholder management on their side from a lot of operations management.

21:49So yeah, it is complex.

21:50Martina Russo:Wasn't the Shopify CEO recently on the record that everything's going to be AI and that they're like translation would be one of the first things that would go? I'm trying to look that up, but yeah, I think we even wrote an article about it maybe like a couple of months ago that they're saying like, oh, everything's going to be AI and translation is one of the first thing we're looking at for AI. But yeah, in reality, it's always harder. Yeah, but also you need to remember that the Shopify platform is built in a certain way, but then the way that the merchants can do translation through the platform is a completely different system.

22:24So I don't exclude that it will be easier for them to deploy AI. They have been translating into Shopify back and for a long time, like when they provide the theme for brands to build upon. That usually comes with a degree of localization in a bunch of languages. but then the way that they make the platform localization friendly already for merchants is a completely different story so that's where they have a long way to go if they really want they are like you need to remember as well like this is a u.s or north american centric company and a lot of the time they don't think in terms of um localization or making like you know localization friendly i actually learned not too long ago that the original story of their ceo setting up or founder setting up shopify was because you wanted to sell snowboards So, I was setting up, we were setting up like a dev store for like just try some new workflow.

23:15And we selected like the default theme and he came up with a bunch of snowboards. And I was like, what the hell? And our Shopify guy was like, oh yeah, this is because that I did it out. So, I thought that was quite funny, quite interesting.

23:28Martina Russo:Toby was a snowboarder. Okay. Yeah. I guess the age would make sense, like 90s. Yeah. So, you recently posted on LinkedIn that you had a pretty good first start to the year. I think revenues are up 30%, you said, and you listed five or six kind of factors that drove growth for you. Very interesting themes, great LinkedIn posts. I encourage everybody to go there. But for those who just listened to the pod, summarize that. What are some of the things that helped you have a good start to the year? It's actually funny because we've looked at the QA growth so far and it's way stronger than 30 percent it's like somehow it's like it's quite funny because the the growth that we had until this year we have been doubling turnover basically every year like year on year so that's been quite interesting and this year it looks like we're still like growing quite a lot but the way that we're growing is a bit different because you know ai the other also the outdoor industry is going through like a bit of a rough patch you know with the tariffs i'm sure that you have been exposed to the tires imposed by Trump's administration in the U.S.