#260 Pairaphrase Co-Founder Rick Woyde on Building a Language Technology Platform

0:00Rick Woyde:I never liked the term machine translation anyways. It just sounds so cold and, you know, it just sounds so mechanical.

0:12Hey everyone, and welcome to SlaterPod. Today on the podcast, we welcome Rick Woyde, co-founder of Pair a Phrase, an AI-powered MT translation management system, or as we now call them, Rick, language technology platforms. In our most recent piece of research, we rebranded the TMSs to LTPs. So, hi, Rick, and thanks so much for joining.

0:35Rick Woyde:Thanks for having me, Florian. Where in the world are you joining us from today? What part of the world? I am in rainy Birmingham, Michigan, and we are a suburb of Detroit. We're about 20 minutes north of Detroit. All right. Welcome, Detroit. So, we're here as always in also rainy Zurich, Switzerland. It's been raining for like three weeks, but let's get started with the podcast. We're getting the same weather. It's terrible. Yeah, it's super hot in the south of Europe and kind of weird here now. All right. So paraphrase, tell us a bit about first your kind of professional background, entrepreneurial story.

1:14You also, I think, ran a couple other businesses. So tell us more about that.

1:19Rick Woyde:I guess I'm a typical entrepreneur in the sense that I dropped out of college and started working and uh you know i've always been an entrepreneur uh you know even when i was a child um so you know it's kind of come natural to me and um and uh i did run through a couple of different businesses to get here i've had many ups and downs i've had success failure everything in between and i've run businesses here in the the detroit area for most of my life but uh i also ran a business in Stuttgart, Germany for a while and also Mexico City. So it was a great experience, even though I didn't make any money and I lost a bunch of money.

2:05Rick Woyde:It was a great experience to live in these different places in these different cultures. So was that behind the kind of idea to get into the language space? Because I guess German and than Spanish? That's a good question. I grew up in a trilingual household. My mother was Uruguayan and my dad was German and they met, you know, through the World War II thing. And so, you know, language has always been a part of our household. My dad, you know, like a typical immigrant when he came here, you know, they looked at, well, well, what skills do you have that are unique that we can use? And it happened to be that he spoke all these different languages.

2:51Rick Woyde:And so now we're, you know, we're talking a long time ago, and this is before LSPs were even there. And so he started translating into Spanish because he moved to Uruguay as a small child. And then from there they asked him, you know, well, can you find translators for Italian and for French and these other languages? And then, you know, voila, your first LSPs were born. And I think a lot of LSDs were born that way, you know, where a translator was given language of some work and they said, well, we need help with these other languages. Can you help us out? Absolutely. That's that's a very classic kind of founder story.

3:28And then you ask your friend, you ask your colleague, and then it kind of continues to to scale from there.

3:34Rick Woyde:So so how is your German still still OK or a little bit rusty? Terrible. in fact the funny thing is is uh when i was living in stuttgart um i would i was hoping to get better at german again and uh so i would go around and speak german to everybody you know the bakery the restaurants what have you and um they would just speak english back to me you know and their english was bad too so i used to joke with them i'm like listen your english isn't any better than my bad German. So that didn't quite work out the way I wanted it to. Yeah. I guess South of Germany is not really known for fluent English, but nice little accent to have very close to what we speak here in Switzerland.

4:18Anyway, let's move on to Paraphrase. So co-founder of Paraphrase, obviously you have a background in kind of the language industry, extended language industry. So Paraphrase is an LTP, language technology platform, TMS. So what was the market gap at the time you founded it? Because it was founded maybe about eight years ago, about nine years ago. And what was the gap you were trying to fill? And also, this is a really tough and very competitive space, the form of TMS space, very, very competitive. So what drew you to that?

4:50Rick Woyde:I think it's a couple of things. At the time, I had a small LSP. And so I had access to customers and I began asking them, you know, a very simple question. Are you using Google Translate? You know, so we're talking about when, when Google kind of really broke, I would say, you know, when they really broke the MT code and really got, you know, it became somewhat of a professional tool and, um, you know, everybody was using it. And so, you know, I asked them some questions like, you know, what are you using it for? And, you know, they were using it for email communications and and things like that where they needed a really quick translation and it didn't have to be perfect you know the classic I just need you know I'm doing some justing here and so that was part of it and then in addition to that as an agency owner one of the things I always struggled with was that when we would get a request for quote um we would have to you know we would have to give it to a project manager to do an analysis.

5:55Rick Woyde:And the Trotto, you know, we were using, we were a Trotto shop, like pretty much everybody was at the time. And I found that the tool was a very complex and cumbersome tool to learn how to use. And it just drove me bananas that I would have to wait or I would have to interrupt someone just to get an analysis. and so I was kind of determined to come up with an app that was simple to use and it kind of runs you know at the time it kind of ran you know in conflict with what a lot of the localization professionals were doing which was they had pretty complex software out there to do translations so that was one of my goals is you know number one I saw that there was a market for translation software.

6:42Rick Woyde:I think translation is something that's done by a broader audience than just localization managers. I think that there's pretty much everybody now in an organization that requires or produces a translation at some point in their day. And so it was really a combination of those two things, this desire for some simplicity in a complex kind of environment, and also the idea that, you know what, everybody's going to be doing translation. And I think that's what we're seeing today. In a sense, it was driven by simplicity, both on kind of the technology and maybe the user interface side as well, because some of these bigger tools can get very, very complex because they cater to like, you know, thousands of different use cases, I guess, maybe not thousands, but hundreds.

7:29So did you have any background in software engineering or like did you partner with third party developers? How did you go about this one?

7:37Rick Woyde:No, I had no experience in software at the time.

7:44Rick Woyde:Bold move. Well, I felt like I didn't have much to lose. So, no, I didn't have any experience in software at the time. So I stumbled around and I went to Networking Aviance and I asked really dumb questions. And people looked at me like, you know, you're not a very intelligent guy here, especially since I was older. When I got into software, it was still very much the young hustle mode where developers would code all night long and sleep during the day. It was during that period of time. I went through all the humiliation of asking dumb questions and looking not very intelligent. That was the beginning of the journey.

8:31Rick Woyde:and then I met a designer by the name of Curtis Jackson who I had known for many years and he was working with a developer and so I started out with those two guys and they taught me a lot. And what about now? Did you pick up some basic coding skills or just a good eye for design and user flow and things like that? Yeah you know I'm more on the problem solving side of things so So the way my brain works is that whenever I'm out and about doing things, buying things or experiencing things, my mind automatically goes to, you know what, we could do this better. There's a better way to do this. So I think I do that all day long, basically.

9:14Rick Woyde:So I'm not a technical person per se, but I have figured out, I think, how to manage software products and how to work with designers and developers who are two different people, by the way. A lot of people would like developers to be designers, and they're not. And a lot of people would like designers to be developers, and they're not. So it took a while, but fortunately I had a lot of patient people who let me go through that learning curve to get to a point where I feel capable of managing these activities. Can you walk us through a couple of case studies, client case studies, no need for names if sensitive, or if you do have some testimonials, just two to three use cases where a paraphrase is deployed with customers?

10:04Rick Woyde:We have a variety of different customers, and some of them are schools where they're translating things like IEPs and other parental communications. There's a growing need for that in the United States. um in addition to that we do a lot of work with multilingual corporations and they are more of the traditional lsp type of uh of um of uh client in the sense that they are uploading files they're collaborating with reviewers editing files they're maintaining translation memories and things like that and that those are people like those are the kind of people that we cater to that maybe they're not highly technical people, but they understand the basic translation workflow of, I get it.

10:54Rick Woyde:Someone produces a translation, we review it, edit it. They understand the value that translation memory and glossaries and things like that bring. And they're kind of like me, in a sense that they're looking for technology that is powerful and does the job, but is easy to use. Very interesting. Hospitals and schools, you said, and you mentioned an acronym, which I I didn't, for the listeners, tell us more about, what was that again? Called an IEP. IEP, what's an IEP? It's basically a report that teachers put together about a student who's maybe struggling in class. Got it. And after a certain number of students, schools need to produce those IEPs and other parental communications in other languages.

11:44Is that state legislation or federal or where's the demand for that coming from?

11:50Rick Woyde:It's a combination of both. Now, obviously, here in the States, I mean, it's really hard to ignore that, you know, there's some political winds that are changing things that have, you know, obviously hurt some of the translation and interpretation providers. But really what they're doing is they're just pushing the need down to the state level is what's happening because the students aren't going away. So how did you come across this segment like schools and I believe also hospitals initially? Was that a segment you were in already before with the LSP, what we now call LSI? Or was that you had the product and targeted these clients specifically?

12:32Rick Woyde:Thank you for the update on the acronyms because I can't keep up with all these changes. We just did this. So basically, it's just TMS became LTP and LSP became LSI, Language Solutions Integrator, because they're doing so much more than a language service, right? No, it's clearly changing tremendously. No, I would say what happened is, you know, at the beginning, we didn't know who our customers were going to be. So we just kind of did a splatter type of approach. And we said, you know, this is who we are. We support all these file formats. We started writing content, started attracting customers, and then they kind of lead you to where you need to go.

13:08Got it. Very interesting. And those would be – they would kind of use it on a recurring basis? Do you have like some kind of SaaS deals with them or they would buy it as needed or what was the – Yeah, we're SaaS.

13:22Rick Woyde:So it's a minimum of an annual subscription. and um and uh you know so in that sense it's a traditional sass and then there's some other ways that you can get um you know if you have smaller needs you can kind of get into using the platform but it's basically an annual or or multi-year agreement so it's been like almost four years now since uh i don't know people call it the chat gpt moment so like the the ai uh the beginning of the AI boom or this cycle of the AI boom. So how are you navigating this? How have you navigated it? What was the impact so far? Yeah. What are you thinking about kind of this part of the cycle that we're in four years in?

14:07Rick Woyde:It's definitely the most disruptive cycle we've been in in a very long time. You know, MT or AI translation, what are we calling it now? Is MT going away? MT is actually going away. It starts to sound a little bit kind of old school. So yeah, we've been starting to call it AI translation just to not have to, because yeah, these AI systems can do so much more, but also translation, hence AI translation. I never liked the term machine translation anyways. It just sounds so cold and it just sounds so mechanical. I never really liked that term anyways. But yeah, no, we've had to adapt too um you know the great thing is is the market's getting bigger for translation software i think that everybody is going to use translation software that produces translations one way or another you know you might be using canva and using their translation software or or maybe you need something that covers a lot of file formats like a paraphrase or someone else um so yeah you know you've got to step up to the challenge of ai now personally i think it's exciting i mean i look at change is two ways.

15:18Rick Woyde:You've got two choices. You know, change is either going to kill your business or you take advantage of the change and you grow your business. And so that's kind of what we're focused on. And we've got a whole suite of generative AI tools that we're rolling out that I think our clients are going to like. For instance, now with us, you can now translate, you can use ChatGPT as a fully pledged file translation engine, just like Google Translate or anybody else. You can upload an XLIF file, for instance, if you wanted, and you could translate it with ChatGPT and get an XLIF file back. And then we're developing our own GPT-2, which is obviously kind of laser-focused on translation tasks.

16:05Rick Woyde:And in addition to that, one of the great things today is that if you put, you know, if you do some model training, you can get some pretty darn good results very quickly. And we're going to, we're seeing more and more users that are going to create content, original content, instead of translation with paraphrase. Kind of like what DeepL is doing with the write program, but ours is prompt-based. So you write a prompt that says, you know, provide me a Spanish page of our API page in Spanish, And then, you know, voila, you get a written content instead of translated content. In terms of the language coverage, like what are you seeing in your part of the world?

16:48Is it mostly Spanish? Is it almost only Spanish? Or do you have a lot of other languages that are requested and running through the platform?

16:56Rick Woyde:There's quite a bit of different languages. I mean, obviously, Spanish is huge, right? I mean, it's just big everywhere. So Spanish is definitely one of the leading languages. But here in the even in the States with the U.S. schools, we've seen an increased demand for Arabic and Dari, you know, and all these languages. I mean, traditionally, you know, immigration has has driven, you know, what translation you need. And and that's still the case today. So but then we have European customers and we have Asian customers and they're obviously translating into, you know, European and Asian languages, too.

17:38Rick Woyde:And one of the great things about LLM based translation, too, is that you're no longer restricted by those languages that either Google or Microsoft or Deep Bell supplies. For instance, we had a customer request Swiss French and with an LLM, it's I can dial that up in five minutes. Yeah, don't ask me about my Swiss French. It's probably as bad as your German. I doubt it. It's been a long, long time. All right. So when you're integrating these AI translation engines and the LLMs, right, so how do you decide what to integrate? There's so much out there that one could integrate. Yeah, that's the tough one, isn't it?

18:25Rick Woyde:That's really the most difficult. That and the ability to add features and not, you know, complicate or compromise the user experience. I think those are the two biggest questions. And again, I think you got to let your customers kind of tell you where to go. One of the great things about a software company in comparison to a service company is that we can pivot real quickly. You know, if somebody needs a, you know, if there's a demand for a different translation application that we're developing, no problem. It's a lot easier on the software side. We can develop, you know, we're software developers.

19:04Rick Woyde:We'll develop anything the customers need. Including a real-time speech translation mobile app. Yeah, that's one of the things we're working on now that we're getting ready to launch this year. Our schools have more needs than just translating content. they actually meet with students and parents. You know, they actually drive to their homes and meet with them in some cases. And, you know, the interpretation solutions today, there are no perfect interpretation solutions. And what the schools, for instance, and what the hospitals are doing, they sign up for something like a language line account, and then they also use internal bilingual people and they're finding that neither of those are perfect.

19:53Rick Woyde:And I don't think that anybody's toolkit today is going to be just one application anymore. I think you're going to have a toolkit of several different tools that you use. And so our app will just be another one of those. And it'll connect to hospital EHR systems and whatever school systems as well so that you can transfer your conversations. from our app into their medical or student records. It's just a very different type of business than the kind of the text-based translation. So yeah, it's probably quite a big project for you guys to spin that up. Well, it's fun. I mean, you know, I get to sit here and work with really talented people and try to develop solutions.

20:40Rick Woyde:I mean, the way I look at things is like I mentioned to you earlier, I see problems and I enjoy trying to solve them. And one of the things is, as I think also when we did the research, it's like really keeping the UI simple, keeping it quite accessible for the users. But how do you prioritize having kind of enough features and being sophisticated enough while still keeping that kind of a clean UI and making it easy to navigate? It's a tough thing to navigate. and there's actually a third component to that and that is demonstrating that value which i actually think lsps have kind of missed the boat on demonstrating that value uh for instance we have a lot of clients you know that are used to just doing the you know i email a file to a translation company they email it back they send me a bill i'm done and now they're they're knee deep in translation and then they're discovering things like text expansion that they weren't aware So coming up with that powerful solution that also demonstrates and communicates that value and keeping that interface nice and clean and simple is a challenge.

21:54Rick Woyde:And you've really got to be clever. I mean, that's really what I get paid for is to kind of navigate that line and come up with those features, but also making it easy to use. Like, for instance, one of the things that we do, an example of that, a very small example of that, is that in most TM tools, right, you got to go do a setup and create a TM. You know, this is going to be a language pair, do a TM, and then you start translating. With paraphrase, you translate, you edit, you hit save, and we create the TM for you in the background. So a lot of that, those powerful features, we try to put in the background and have them automated whenever possible so that the user doesn't get bogged down with all these extra tasks that in many cases I feel are really unnecessary today.

22:39Rick Woyde:And, you know, it's interesting to see that the translation industry is starting to catch up with that idea. You know, when we first got started with paraphrase, and this is one of the reasons that we never went, that until now we've never really tried to do business with LSPs is because we just didn't think that they were ready for our approach. you know all the all the tools that i saw at the time like memsource and things like that they kind of had that trottles feel you know where we're going to give you so much technology we're going to give you so many buttons to press you know and then you only wind up pressing 10 of those buttons as a result you know i don't know how well your microsoft word or excel skills are but when i see that that uh that uh interface of theirs i'm like i barely know how use any of this stuff.

23:28Rick Woyde:And I think that's the case for most people. That's why we're on Google Workspace, Rick, and not on Microsoft. It was a beautiful moment when we started Slater moving from the Microsoft stack to the Google stack. It was nice and easy now. It always has been for 10 years. But you're seeing that now. You're seeing companies and LSPs begin to embrace that simplicity. you know and the value i think that that an lsp brings um is a little bit different than what uh has been communicated in the past yeah that's that's why we now call them again language solutions integrators because they need to integrate a lot more than they used to right it's no longer getting the file translating and sending it back but like you need to be able to put a few pieces together to still make uh to still basically remain in business and be competitive Yeah, I'm going to need you to send me an updated list of all these acronyms so I sound current.

24:24Just two. I'll send you two articles. So we put that up and I'll send you the report. Yeah. So I want to talk to you about sales and marketing. I mean, so, you know, paraphrase has been, I'm not sure if I'm doing it justice, but a little bit under the radar, at least from our perspective. But I noticed you guys, for example, reactivated your YouTube channel recently. So how did you manage to grow? Like, was it mostly product lab? Were you knocking on doors? Were you doing business development? Yeah. And what are the plans kind of going forward to be more visible in the marketplace? Yeah.

24:58Rick Woyde:So, no, you're absolutely right. We've kind of been under the radar, especially in the translation business. And we're kind of inching our way forward in the industry, so to speak. And so that's completely accurate. And, you know, honestly, we got started with uh with seo this is kind of the way i i i work in a lot of cases is um you know we created this website gets no traffic uh like 90 of the websites out there and uh i literally i went on linkedin i mean this is this is how i did it i went on linkedin i reached out to three seo people only one replied uh interesting enough and i began working with her and we just started writing blogs and and we started getting website traffic so we've kind of built on that and now we have a complete marketing department uh led by candace chapman and uh you know now we've got content writers we've got uh technical seo we've got paid advertising we've got a link builder on staff so that it just kind of grew but really it's it's just trying to communicate our story and who we and getting eyeballs on it.