#367 – Navigating the World of Translations, Languages, and AI with Jana Krekic

#367 - Navigating the World of Translations, Languages, and AI with Jana Krekic Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 367 of the AM PM podcast. My guest this week is Jana Krekic from, she's living in Germany now, but originally from Serbia. She's a specialist when it comes to languages. She speaks five languages herself, and she's got a team of 90 people that speak pretty much any language that you want for any marketplace that you may be selling on in the Amazon ecosystem. We're gonna be talking about languages and translating your listings to different countries and all the things that you need to be thinking about, plus a lot of other really cool stuff In this episode, I hope you really enjoy it. Also, don't forget to sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter. That's my new newsletter that started back in August. It's totally free. BillionDollarSellers.com. New issue comes out every Monday and Thursday. This is not some sort of promotional email. This is actually real stuff that you can really, really use. Plus, we have a little bit of fun as well in there. Enjoy. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Jana, welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. I'm so happy to have you here. How are you doing? Speaker 2: Hi, Kevin. Thank you so much for finally having me on your podcast. I've been waiting for this invite for a long time now, but thank you so much for inviting me now. I'm really honored to be here. Speaker 1: I'm just trying to catch you. You're always like on the go. You're at some events in the U.S. or in Europe or somewhere. I'm just trying to catch you. Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you got me, so I'm really, really excited. Speaker 1: You're a hard catch. You're a hard catch. Your husband, every time I see him, I shake his hand. I'm like, dude, good job. She's a hard catch. I praise the ground you walk on. Speaker 2: I will let him know this. Speaker 1: So what's up? What's going on in the other world? Speaker 2: So in the other world, all good. I am home in Europe and we've had a very, very big summer, busy summer with the wild tea. And I think a lot of very big brands are very, really interested in going to different places, expanding. And I was pretty much worried a little bit beginning this year, because the first quarter was not that great. Last year was like so-and-so. But then Q2 has been very, very well. And we've seen significant increase, especially in very big brands and enterprises wanting to. Speaker 1: So let's back up, so people are wondering what the heck, I don't know who this Jana girl is, what the heck is she even talking about? So let's back up a few steps there and let's say, how did you get into this e-commerce space originally? Were you a seller or did you just branch into it because you were helping a buddy out or what was the origins of your get into e-commerce and Amazon story? Speaker 2: So that's interesting. So my e-commerce journey started about 17 years ago. I started working at, I actually have background in languages and literature and actually played the piano, went to music academy and all of that. So this was like a different life back then. Wow. Different Jana's world than it is right now. So 17 years ago, I just like got my bachelor's and master's in Scandinavian languages. And then I was offered a job in a call center to be a call center representative in under a fake name. So I pick a name. I went by Heidi Larson. And then after I got promoted, I got to keep my name like I got back to you after I got to be a manager. So, I started working in one of the very big eCommerce businesses in Europe. They were located in Denmark. And I spent about 8 years over there. And I literally built the company together with some of my co-workers. And there were like 4 of us at a time. It was like a startup. And there was a founder. And 5 of us built the whole business from scratch. This is where I learned everything like how to build Shopify, eCommerce, Amazon, absolutely everything. And they let me play around with their Amazon account. This is when I first heard about what's a buy box 12 years ago. And nobody cared about Amazon at that point in that company. They had over 150,000 products. They have a huge warehouse. And they were mostly selling products from their own website. So I played around with Amazon a little bit. And I thought that the translations that they had in different marketplaces were not great. So I hired some of the people that were in call center. I was like, can you just do a little research for me, do a better listing translation. And then we started seeing some different impressions. We even got a couple of sales. It was like, wow, I'm a genius. This is working. And then I went back to my boss and I think he gave me a 50-euro like bonus or something ridiculous like that. And then I was just like, wow, seriously, like, I'm not going to like, if I appreciate myself just a little bit, I'm not going to stay and work for this guy anymore. And then eventually I quit my job and I decided to start my own thing. And this is how YLT, translations, was actually Born, but I was always interested in SEO, Google manipulation, all sorts of manipulation when it comes to content, keywords, all of that. And so I thought that Amazon was going to be actually easier playground than Google is and ranking on Google and all of that. And I was right. And at the time, there were not that many agencies that were doing what I thought was something that the market really, really needed. And so I decided to kind of niche down to Amazon only and it was a big risk because I was like, this is either going to be a hit or miss. And actually people really love that we kind of niche down and did we like offer Amazon only we're dedicated for old Amazon content type of SEO services. Speaker 1: What does YLT stand for? Speaker 2: That's a great question. So me being an SEO expert, it's not something I'm proud of because I went to my mom. So she was like, Oh, this should be like, acronym, like Jana Linguist Team or something like that. And I was like, great, mom, this is like, you're brilliant. I didn't do a single research. So I bought a domain name, wildt.translations.com. And then after like two, three days, the domain was up, I had like this chat installed on my website. And I was a one man band at that point. So I did like chats, emails, everything. And then people like started asking, or they would come to a chat, and they would ask me, So can you explain to me what this Bible verse like Matthew 22, 15 means? And I'm like, why do people want that? They're like, we want translations of the Holy Bible. And I would only get the Holy Bible requests. And I'm like, this is so weird. And then I typed in Wildly Translations in the search bar, and I got that actually Wildly stands for Young Literature Translation of the Bible. Oh, really? So it was the Bible results for the first four pages. Basically, it was me against God for the first three months. And I had a really good SEO team and we eventually got ranked for the YLT instead of the Bible, which is now on page five. And then what I decided I'm going to rename it into, and it means YLT now stands for Your Listing Translation. Speaker 1: Now that's an interesting point because in translations, things mean one thing in one place and they mean something else somewhere else. So your name of your company and the way you set it up is almost like a perfect example of how something can mean something when you say it one way to mean something, but in another genre, another language or another group of people, it means something different. And you got to know those differences. Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. Like when you pick a name for your brand, like you should like check all of the 15 languages and if there are any weird translations of your name or offensive or, you know, like there was like an example of Hyundai Kona and no, it was, yeah, it was Kona or something like that. And then in Portuguese they had to completely remodel They picked another like a Hawaiian, I think it was like Hawaii, I think, same place for your summit. So they, it was like Hyundai, Hawaii, because Kona in Portuguese, it meant female genitalia in slang. So they had to completely change the car model, they had to stop whatever they're producing. So a lot of times it literally can do a lot of harm. If you don't know what a certain word means, like a different marketplaces. Speaker 1: So what's your original nationality? Where are you from originally? What's your native language? Speaker 2: My native language is Serbian. I'm Serbian. Speaker 1: You're Serbian. And then you said you studied languages and you speak something like seven, is it seven languages? Or what's the number that you actually are fluent in? Speaker 2: So no, no, it's not seven. I would say it's so I speak Norwegian, Danish, German, English, Serbian, I would say five, I'm fluent in five. And then I'm, I'm basic in French, I think I could like brush up on my French could be better, but I'm not fluent in French. So five for now. And fifth is the Serbian, which is my native language. Speaker 1: What do you think is the hardest language to learn out there? Or the hardest even when you're dealing with translations? And what's the hardest one? Speaker 2: I think probably one of the toughest languages is Finnish and Hungarian because they have so many different cases. They have so many different, like grammar is impossible to learn, honestly. And it's very, very, those two are very hard languages. That's like when it comes to Europe and when it comes to other languages, I mean, definitely Japanese is very, very challenging and Chinese as well. But they have like mostly different alphabets, but when it comes to like European languages and something that, you know, what's difficult with like Finnish language is that they don't have any international words at all. Like they don't have the word telephone or any sort of like resembling word that you're like, oh, okay. Speaker 1: I thought taxi was in every language. Speaker 2: No, they don't say taxi. No, they don't say taxi. They have a word for it. I don't speak Finnish. I just know that if they say telephone, they say Puhelin. Like this is what they use for telephone. And Icelandic also doesn't have almost like literally like non-international words. So I think this is something that makes it really, really difficult for people who also travel to the country and you cannot recognize a single word. Even people who speak multiple languages are completely lost. So this is what I know. This is what people say that Hungarian and Finnish are literally so hard to learn because of all the grammar problems and all different cases and nouns and just a bunch of complicated grammar rules. Speaker 1: So when someone wants to learn a language, you've learned five of them, you know, maybe there's some people listening out there like, yeah, I want to learn some Spanish. I want to learn some French or a little bit. I'm dealing a lot with China. I'd like to learn a little bit of Chinese. What's the best way to approach actually learning a language? Is it to use something like Babel or Rosetta Stone or is it to just immerse yourself in it and just or watch television or listen to radio or? What do you think is the best way to actually start getting a grasp on a language if you want to learn something? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I used to teach Norwegian to very big corporate clients in Norway after they get a job as like CEOs or like Engineers, they had to pass a certain exam. And then all of them, they used to learn a language by watching TV or listening to radio. And I think it's great to get yourself familiarized with the accent, with the sound of the language. But I don't think you can learn language that way because that is passive learning. Because not until you try to pronounce words and actually express yourself, you're not actually actively learning the language. So I think this is great in addition to speaking with someone, the actual language that you listen to radio and watch TV and your favorite movies. But I think crucial is to actually speak and try speaking to someone who knows the language. And what I think is important is that somebody who's teaching you is a native speaker. Because no matter how good somebody speaks the language, they're learning Like 30 years ago, there's like this specific nuance to how good this level of this person goes, like accents of certain words and stuff like that. You really have to be extraordinary if you speak a language on a native level. Speaker 1: And my ex-wife was Colombian, so I was learning some Spanish. I mean, she spoke English, but she learned English by watching Friends and How I Met Your Mother and Grey's Anatomy. And then she took a few classes, but she learned it just by immersing herself. And so I was trying to learn some. I went to some classes. I did some of the online stuff. And I never got fluent, but I can get by. But now, even with my maids, they're from Mexico, And they speak a little bit of English, but I try to speak to them in Spanish. Just, you know, whenever they're here, if I know I'm gonna clean the window, you know, I'll try to say something in Spanish. And I know it's broken, but it's at least it's practice. And then when they say something back to me in Spanish, I'm like, I understood what they said. I might not understand every word, but I got the general gist. But what she always used to tell me, and it's true, is you don't, you can't, so many of us translate when it's another language in our head. You're speaking to me, let's say in Spanish, I'm translating in my head. You can't do that. You got to think in that language. You can't become fluent until you actually think in that language. You're not translating in your head as it's being spoken or you're not thinking like, how do I say this? And okay, it's como se llama. It's just naturally coming out. And that's the trick. That's the trigger that where you can start really making good progress, I think. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's a that's like a next level. Like when you start thinking in another language, this is where you kind of get the full grasp of it. Like you cannot start feeling like more comfortable. And there's like a really cool thing. Like, so I know a lot of people who are bilingual, even trilingual. And then they, you know, they got asked, like, so what's your native language? You know, if you have like a French mom and like a US dad, And then they're like, well, I'm like proficient in both languages, but actually the language you count the money in, in your head, this is your strongest language. Speaker 1: Really? Speaker 2: Yes. So I always count money, yes, in Serbian. And I'm like. Speaker 1: Even if you're in the US and you're counting your $100 bills, you're at the club, you're counting those in Serbian in your head. Speaker 2: Yes, subconsciously I'm doing it in Serbian. And this is your native language, like 100% the strongest language you have. So for anyone out there wondering if they're bilingual, but what's my strongest language, just think of what language you count your money in. And that's it. 100% true. Speaker 1: Speaking of counting your money, I mean, that's what your company does is you help people count the money in other languages. I mean, so just for everybody knowing, I mean, Jana's company is how many people you have working for you now? Like 50 or something? Speaker 2: Right now it's 90. Speaker 1: So you have 90 people working for you and you're translating mostly Amazon, but also other e-commerce Shopify and other stuff, listings into native languages for other marketplaces. How many different languages can y'all service right now? Speaker 2: So we provide most, I think, yeah, we don't do like Singapore and Australia, but apart from that, we cover all other global marketplaces. So we cover like the whole Europe, which is Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden. And then outside of Europe, we do Japan, UAE, Mexico, Canada, Brazil. That's about 11 languages, I think. Not good at math, that's why I do languages. Speaker 1: So when someone comes to you, if something's in a, if it starts in, I mean, sometimes it starts in English and someone from selling in the US, it's starting to sell, let's say, in France, so you got to convert it to France. But what if it's someone that started selling in France, it's in French, And they want to go into UAE and do it in Arabic. Do you have someone that's French to Arabic direct? Or in some cases, is it French to English and then English to Arabic? How does that work? Speaker 2: Yeah, so we never have like this intermediary language. Like we never have translated to English and then English to Arabic because you can lose a lot of things while putting this like language in the middle. Like if I translate it to French to English, then I will probably kind of lose the original nuance and the style I'm having in French by translating to English. And then whoever's translating to Arabic, it's going to be like, oh, based on the English text. And every translator, they have their own styles. So maybe they'll do it in a different style than the original text is in and they will miss on some key elements and then somebody will translate it and have a completely different idea about what the goal of this brand is. So we never do that. We have the translator that covers all language pairs. If you're a German brand, if you want to go to Mexico, we have someone who will translate for German to Mexican. I don't think we have someone that will translate like Arabic to other languages, but we have a team that will translate from English, French, and German to Arabic, but not vice versa, because we don't get any requests for that. Speaker 1: And one of the things I notice a lot of times is my ex-wife would sometimes watch stuff in subtitles because she could speak English, but if they went too fast or if there was a heavy accent, it would be a little bit trouble. So she just put on the English, a lot of times, the English subtitles. And, or vice versa, if it was something in Spanish, you know, she's watching, you know, what's that one paper heist or whatever that popular Netflix show that's from Spain. And she would watch it in Spanish, but she'd put on the English subtitles either for me, or sometimes she'd just do it to practice to see. But sometimes I'm listening to it in Spanish, and I'm reading down there in the English. And I would turn to her and say, that translation is not what they just said. She's like, yeah, no, it really bugs me. So things like that where it's hard to get those nuances, those little things, translating like Shakespeare from that kind of flowery English into some other language has got to be difficult. So that's part of what you guys do is help How do you capture that personality, that essence of the language, not just a hardcore translation like a Google Translate or something would do where it's just translating words, basically? Speaker 2: Yeah, because we work with a lot of US brands and US content is pretty much very salesy and fluffy and everything is very exciting. And then you can't translate that the same way and present it to Germans, who are completely different mentality, different shopping habits. They are really much like puzzled by that type of language. So you're gonna have to tone it down for them. It has to be very much like, you know, it's like black and white, very like, you know, straight to business, show me the features. Don't go like emotional with me, like they hate it. And they don't, it doesn't sit well with them. And then this is something you have to always take into consideration, like the audience you're talking to, because you want this audience to feel like they're buying from a local brand, and not from like an overseas brand, because they don't like it. You know, like, I also want to buy something that is like produced, for instance, like in Europe, if I want to buy something made in Germany, I'm going to have like a certain expectations, like how that's going to sound and the quality that follows and all of that. Speaker 1: Speaking of the AI stuff, a lot of people are like, well, I don't need someone like Jana's company anymore. AI can just do it for me. It's good enough. Yeah, I tried Google Translate in the past, but this AI stuff is even better. I was just on a call last week with a big seller based in China, a Chinese-based seller doing 50 million a year or something like that. And he said, we were asking him questions about what, you know, what are some of the, uh, the challenges? Uh, he said, used to be, you know, writing listings for the Chinese, writing listings in English and trying to capture the essence of the culture and stuff. And he said, that barrier is now gone because we can use AI to do it. What would you say to, to something like that? Uh, when you're hearing this, you know, I've kid you and, uh, you've heard it from others like, Oh, is your business dead? Because AI is going to take over. What are you going to do next? Uh, Jana, are you going to, go into vacuum sales or what are you going to do? Speaker 2: I'm going to be an Amazon seller. Speaker 1: Yeah, at least you got the data. You know what works and what doesn't. Speaker 2: Hey, don't worry about me. Speaker 1: You're good. Speaker 2: I mean, this is a question I get asked very often. Speaker 1: What do you say to that though? Because I don't think, I think my personal is AI is a great tool. It's great for brainstorming. It's great for maybe fine tuning something in certain cases, but it's not a substitute for the human. What are your thoughts on all that? Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think that, I think AI is incredible. And I think we are, we're still, you know, we're yet to see like all the possibilities and if it conquers the world and kill us all. But for now, I think what is very mesmerizing and why people really love it and use it, I mean, I use it like on every day life, People just like to help me around Excel formulas, all of that, just making my life easier. But when it comes to copywriting and translations, I understand that it's really fantastic when you put a prompt in AI and it comes out with a completely new text, blog content, listing, whatever, just because you tell them how to write it in a certain way. So I think it's great because AI tool creates something out of nothing. And that is really great. But then I kind of got pretty tired of Like AI content, especially like on LinkedIn, all these posts, like they seem very repetitive. Now you can recognize a lot of the content that is being written by AI just because people don't put too much effort into actually differentiating their content from other people. Like there's like this extension I use, it's called AI PRM. And there you can literally like pick a style of a different content and it's going to be like, salesy, happy, analytical, journalistic, whatever. And then you can like, kind of like get a different sort of like a vibe of the text that you read. But it's still, it's still very trackable by human eye. So I don't have to like go to a website that's gonna like, Discover for me if this is AI content or not. So I now kind of see it being like very repetitive and it's not very creative. So I think that you would still need, if you want something which is average, it's good, but average, you can use AI. But I think if you want something that is creative and outside of the box, you would still need humans to put their effort into creating that sort of content. When it comes to translations, it's a bit different because what we've discovered and I've tested about 10 to 15 tools and I've got a lot of like, my LinkedIn is like full of like messages like saying like, hey, can we collab on our AI tool? We're trying to create new listings with translations. And everything we've tested so far has not been that great. Actually, it would have taken us longer to fix those type of translations than to do them from scratch. And you would also have to pay for that because nobody will do proofreading for free. But the problem was that if you put a product, like let's say a title and bullets in these tools, and then you click translate, and you kind of want, and everybody says like, no, it's going to transcreate the content. It's not going to be word by word machine translation. It will transcreate the content, but then it will maybe just transcreate the first three bullets. And just like totally ignore the fourth and fifth bullet, which might have very important information. So when you translate the content given to an AI from title to bullets, you're going to have 70% of the information you have in the source text, because it's going to play around and create something out of nothing like play around with what it's given. But AI tool will choose which segments of the text they're going to take for translation and transcreation and localization. And you can't control that. I mean, you cannot control that 100% as of like right now. So sometimes in the brands don't speak the language, usually they don't have the team which speaks the language. And a lot of times they will not even know that you don't have your biggest and the best quality translated in this other language. Like that's it. Just because AI tool kept all of these emojis at the beginning of the bullets, you're like, wow, this is amazing, right? Because there's no way for you to check that. And I think this is a big downside of AI right now when it comes to translations. It's not following the source text close enough. And it's definitely not... It doesn't have any keywords. I think keywords are a big problem. And then if you have to... Feed the keywords into AI. I mean, it's going to take a lot of time for you as well to do the keyword research. So you're not going to, you know, cut time like on the research. The AI is not going to do any research for you. So all these tools are still, they're still having problems with integrating keywords because they don't like The tool is not going to log into Helium 10 and then put the keywords in there. And also, you will have to check what sort of keywords the AI tool put. There are so many parameters. As you know, it's not only like search volume. That tool is not going to go into brand analytic reports and then integrate the top-selling keywords. And so I think that that is going to be still one of the biggest problems with AI, not being consistent with the source text and not having Um, the keywords that you as like doing a manual research or anybody on your team would do. Uh, I don't think it's, it's, um, that that is a still very big issue. I think it's definitely going to be sold in future, but I just think that right now, I don't think it's good enough for you to just completely ditch any human work at all. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I'm using it to fine tune writing. So if, if I'm not using it to go to AI and say, write me a story about me walking my dog, And we saw squirrels and it started to rain or something. Okay, and then AI makes it up. It's not very good. It'll make something up. And so like you say, it's okay, but you can tell. But what I'll do, I'll use is I'll write the actual story. In my words, the best that I can write it and I'm not a bad writer. And then I will paste that into AI and say, can you rewrite this, keeping the same length? Or maybe shorter in some cases and add a little humor, add a little this or whatever. And it'll come back and rewrite it. And some of what it rewrites is actually damn good brainstorming. It's like, this is a better way. I mean, I did that in my newsletter a while back. I talked about the Balcony Barbie and I put in Balcony Barbie. I wrote the whole thing originally and I said something like, She was on the, you know, she was on the balcony and she was talking to a guy who, you know, was fully dressed or something. I wrote it in those terms. So the AI changed that to say she was on the balcony, you know, feeling the breeze and he didn't get the memo that clothing, clothes were optional. So that was a better way to actually say it. And so I used just that little chunk and then, but I still rewrote it, but I used that. So from a brainstorming point of view, I think it's good. But another example of this, and you say it in the translation, is when I was getting my divorce, well I'm still in the process of it, but luckily it didn't get too bad, too heated, but my wife, or soon to be ex-wife, she's from Colombia, she will not write to me or speak to me in English anymore. Everything is done in Spanish by text. And so in her rationale, in her mind, was like, This way I know I'm saying it the way I mean it with my emotion and sorry if your translator messes it up. Sorry if you're, you know, if you're throwing that, you don't understand or you're throwing that into Google, at least from her point of view, she's like, I said it the way I meant to say it. And there's nothing, if you didn't understand it, that's not my problem. So that's another good example. I mean, that's, that's a, of how things get lost. Like you just said, the emotions and the, and things when, when I take some big long texts where she's saying something all in Spanish and I, I can read part of it, but a lot of it I don't understand, so I have to throw it into Google Translator into one of the other tools and I'll get the gist, but it's not with the same emotion and it may, like you said, change something up. And so that's where I think a lot of people don't quite understand the limitations on these tools and why You need somebody like YLT Translations to actually do this stuff for you, and it's not going to go away. And if you want to do it half-ass, use the tools and get half-ass sales. If you want good sales and to maximize your opportunity and potential, you need to use real humans that actually know e-commerce, not just some language translator service you found online. It'll do this for a hundred or 50 bucks and some guy in Chile doing it that's maybe can speak the language, but he's not versed in all the idiosyncrasies of e-commerce. So how do you guys stay on top of everything of what's, how you should be, how the German market is different than the U.S. market and how the French and how all the little things that are changing, you know, like right now, In the US market, there's more AI being used for rankings. I mean, it used to be, make sure you get the right keywords in there. You can do keyword research in different countries, but now they're using semantic language and they're using all these different, the algorithm's gotten much more sophisticated where it's not going to be so much just keyword based anymore. It's going to be contextual based and it's going to make its own interpretation. So how are you guys Doing that. Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, I've done a lot of reading about Bird, the Amazon open open source AI. And I think it's really fascinating how they're hoping to just make like running shoes like in a more like a semantic like thing because it's going to be also Nike shoes and I don't know like Flapshoes, just like underrunning shoes are going to be so many more words and so many more semantic meanings. I think it's absolutely fascinating. So I would definitely, for instance, when it comes to AI, I think this is going to be a game changer. And I think this is something that everybody should get more information on and get training on. And also, I was checking their website, you can get training on Word and all of that. So we'll definitely get a look into that because I think that is absolutely brilliant. And I think it also gives you so much more opportunity. And I think it depends on how creative you get and how broad this BERT is going to be in their own semantic meetings. So I think that this is going to be really interesting. But as of for now, I think it's only available for US. So it's not that relevant to what we do. Fortunately or fortunately for us, international marketplaces are like lighting years behind the US when it comes to rules and all of that. Because you can still keep your caps locked in bullets and nobody's going to take your listing down. And there's a lot of things that are against TOS in the US, which you can get away with on other international marketplaces and we can still take advantage of that. So I think that ABIRD is an exciting model, but I'm just wondering what is it going to be available for in global marketplaces? Speaker 1: Yeah, they're doing their training. I saw something and there's four main languages they're using, but they're also using like 18 or something different, 15 or 18 different languages or something like that in the training to try to really fine tune it as well. It's going to be, yeah, I agree. It's going to be interesting to see where all that goes. But right now, I think you're seeing, I think a lot more big companies come into space. I mean, you work with a lot of mom and pop Amazon folks, but you're seeing now, I think you told me that more and more of these big brands are kind of waking up and saying, hey, we need to get our act together when it comes to Expansion in these other marketplaces and really nailing our translation. We've had some flunky doing it for a while in the company or something. Now we need professionals to do this that understand e-commerce. Why do you think that is and what are you seeing in that realm? Speaker 2: So I think I do a lot of like on LinkedIn, I post like, I mean, I'm going to say a lot, but this is why I wish I had more videos on that. But I love to do like analysis of like big brands and just like private label brands. I had a call a couple of days ago with a huge brand doing strong eight figures in the US, but they're doing so badly in Europe. I think their biggest marketplace is in Italy and it's like €4,000 a month, which is ridiculous comparing to how much more they can do. So a lot of very big brands, they do not actually understand how things work on Amazon and they don't have a competent team. among their employees that understands how something works and they often have like an external consultant and just like aggregators, you know, just like hire this and that just to help them, you know, like put things together, but they didn't have a competent team to kind of build the brands and like, you know, and sell them the way they should and just to have their full potential on Amazon as well. And then these big brands, they see a bunch of these private label sellers basically stealing their sales. They're like, how can this no-name brand, why are they buying our baby diaper bag, their baby diaper bag instead of ours? And we are, I don't know. Kiko or some other very huge brand. And they get upset because they also want to conquer Amazon as well. So they now go from retail and brick and mortar, they want to go to Amazon. And they all say, well, Amazon is so important for us, but they don't actually understand what it takes to win on Amazon and how they should do the content better, PPC, and a bunch of other things. Because they're still kind of old school, but they want to move in this direction because they see that there is a lot of money on Amazon and they see insane sales. And you have so many tools that can tell you that. I'm sure their teams do a lot of research. And when they see that a private label brand does 1 million a month or one sold product, then they're just like, what are we doing? So we've seen this year, the last seven, eight months, very, very big brands with huge catalogs just saying like, hey, so We want to go all in. We've done these machine translations or we've worked with several agencies before, but we haven't actually seen any results. So now, we want to do it the right way. We want to find someone who actually knows Amazon, understands. They're going to make a sales copy that will sell to the new audience because we have all the numbers saying that this category is great, but we're not just seeing any results from it. And at first I thought like, well, maybe this is just like one or two companies that kind of really, you know, kind of understand the potential of Amazon and really kind of want to dive into that. But then after like 10, 12, like very big Brands and enterprises, I was sure that all of them have a similar story, like why they want to improve and sell and enhance their sales on Amazon as well. Because I think for them, that was like, until very recently, was like an untapped market. They maybe thought that they don't need to be on Amazon, but then also there's a certain Portion of FOMO as well. And also seeing like how many other sales are being made from your product in your category and you're missing out on that just because you didn't have somebody that is competent enough to help you build that Amazon side of your business. Speaker 1: So you guys are not just, here's my listing translated, you're actually helping, you're more full service where you'll help them optimize everything across the listing. It's not just, here's my copy, translate this for me, thank you very much. But you go all the way into doing the keyword, deep dive into the keyword research in that language, and then helping them with the bullets and the description, the title and the normal stuff, but also a lot of the backend attributes and all that kind of stuff as well, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. We provide a full service for your content to be optimized, to have everything your competitors don't have. So we try to position you better than your biggest competitor or we try to put you in top three competitors on that marketplace. Sometimes it's very challenging, but a lot of times it is not because no matter how big this brand is and how well they're doing in the US, On international marketplaces, they suck. And if you go and do analysis of all the top competitors, you'll see that their content doesn't make a lot of sense and they miss out on the most keywords because their teams did not do keyword research for that marketplace ever. And this is something that you can definitely use and you can put it in your content and then you can be the product that will show up instead of them. And this is a potential that a lot of brands miss out on. It's basically leaving money on the table, just because you don't want to enhance your content and keywords and they use those good keywords in your PPC campaigns and so on. Speaker 1: What about translating American English to UK English? A lot of people think they can just take their American listing and just stick it over in the UK. Well, they speak English. I don't need a translation. I would argue different. Speaker 2: Yeah, I would also argue different. Speaker 1: Can you share a little bit of insight there, maybe even a couple interesting examples of how you actually need translation for the UK from the US? Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's this baby diaper bag I already mentioned. So we had a seller and she was selling this product and she just copy pasted the US content to UK and then she just let it roll. And six, seven months later, she reached out to us and she was like, so I think my listing is not great because obviously I've been ranked for different things other than this product. And can you help me out? So we did an analysis of her listing and what it turned out to be is that the word diapers, which is kids diapers in the US actually is the word that used for adult diapers in the UK. So she was ranked for adult diapers, not kids diapers. So something completely opposite than what she intended to. And the whole keyword list that she had in the US was literally maybe 10% of what you should have used in the UK. So for instance, she had keywords such as baby diaper changing stations, which you don't have in the UK. They don't have these changing stations as you do in the US. Or baby shower gifts, like you don't have baby shower gifts in the UK by popular demand, they were nowhere to be found. When we did the keyword research, and there were just like so many things. And then also, she had also like Spanish keywords because the Hispanic population is going to have a lot of Spanish keyword results in your US keyword research. And she also put that in her PPC campaigns and everywhere in the UK, which was absurd because these search results, they do not show up in Spanish on the UK marketplace, because they have a different population of people living there. So she really did not do a great job and she spent a lot of money and she spent a lot of time on that, just having copy pasted her listing from US and UK. And you would think like, well, it's the same language, why should I do anything? And I'm sure the keywords are the same. Sometimes the keywords are like 90% of the same, but then you're missing out on like 10% of keywords that you're not going to have in your listing. So what I have to say is that if you don't want to localize, just make sure that you have all the right keywords. But even if we take, for instance, how people speak in the States, you would say in Pennsylvania, In Slovenia, you're going to say book bag, and then in New York, you say backpack. Even inside of the States, you have differences and people call things different names. So just imagine two completely separate countries that use different localized words and different patterns. I think there's... What's it called in Australia? They call thongs... They're called flip-flops, I think. Or something like that, which is like, you know, doesn't make any sense to any other US speaker. Speaker 1: So diapers in the UK or what for children are nappies, right? Speaker 2: Nappies. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: You should have used the word nappies. And if you do the keyword, like if you put diapers, because a lot of people obviously do a lot of mistakes with that. You will see diapers somewhere in the middle, but then you will have nappies all the way. So she could have just typed in diapers and she would have seen like, why do I have these word nappies all the way here? And it's something you can do on your own. You don't have to pay for this or hire anyone. You just have to do your homework before you launch another marketplace. Speaker 1: What do you guys charge for a listing? If I come to you, does it depend on how many you got to translate or what's just like a ballpark if I'm like, okay, I want to give this a shot and see what happens. I'm selling in Germany, my listing sucks. I'm going to have Jana's team help me out here. What am I looking at? Probably $300, $500, $1,000. What am I looking at? Speaker 2: So we can really keep a competitive pricing. We're not cheap, but we're not expensive. We're somewhere in the middle so everyone can afford us. So basically, it depends on how long your listing is because We used to have a flat fee for absolutely everyone. But now people tend to go crazy with premium A-plus content. It can go to 1,500 words. So we can charge the same as your listing has 700 words. So our pricing goes from $100 to $200, depending on how big, how long your listing is. But it includes... The whole packaging includes title, bullets, A-plus content, Keyword research, keywords and backend search terms and everything you need. Even we can include keyword databases if need be. But basically, this is what's covered with $100 to $200. And this is charged per parent, per language. We don't charge for variations. So if you have one parent and 10 variations, we're just going to charge you for one product. Speaker 1: Well, that's very reasonable. That's cheaper than what I would have expected. I need to come back and say that's a no-brainer. That's an offer you can't refuse right there. Speaker 2: I mean, if you have five ASINs to five languages, it's going to be probably like 500 bucks. It's like one per language, but it's going to be $2,500 for five ASINs to five languages. But basically, it's a one-time investment in this product. You can optimize them every 6 months, but you can search for new keywords yourself. When you have the first keywords, you can just put that keyword that we got for you. And just doing your research in Helium 10, you can get Possibly new keywords and you can insert those, which is something that I recommend like every six months to do optimization and nobody does that. So basically, let's say this is like a one-time investment only. So it's like $2,500 for five ASINs or five languages. And this is everything you pay for and you can make like x3, x4, x5 amount of money based on this single investment you have because you fixed your content. So it's really like when compared to all the PPC agency pricing you have to pay every month and like other charges you have. This is really something that even if it doesn't work out, it's not like you blew a lot of money on it, honestly. Speaker 1: Do you do packaging as well? And maybe like if I have instructions or manuals for my product, do you do those as well? Speaker 2: Yeah, we absolutely cover everything that has English language on it or any other language you want to get translated, which means like manuals, packaging translation, which is really important, follow-up emails, inserts, storefront, ads, anything you need translated, we can take care of it. Speaker 1: Now, you're dealing with a lot of different people all over the world. What are you seeing are the best markets, in your opinion, for people to expand to? So, if I'm selling in the US, where should I go next? Canada, and then Germany, or then Japan, or the UK? What are you seeing, based on your years of doing this, that would be a good strategy for someone who's thinking about expanding internationally, if they don't want to go all in right away? Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think what's smart for the US brands is always to go to either Canada or Mexico because it's very close and it's very convenient. And this is what a lot of sellers do. It's very rare that somebody from the US hasn't sold in Mexico and then goes directly to Europe. I haven't seen that. They do at least a couple of products in Mexico to see how it goes. If they have somewhat results, they decide to go to Europe. So this is what I've seen happen. So it's either Mexico or Canada, always for US brands. They don't do full catalogs. They do a couple of bestsellers, see how it goes. And then if they're happy with that, they move forward to expansion to Europe. And when it comes to Europe, it's always going to be UK and Germany, like always. And now France, Spain and Italy are the following marketplaces, which are good, but Germany and UK are the two biggest ones and it's always like whatever, usually like bestsellers in the US are also going to be bestsellers in Europe and in Germany, if you're not selling plastic toys. Plastic toys did not do that well in Germany, but wooden toys and everything that is kind of retro, old school, something that your grandparents like used to play with. Europe is a very kind of like sustainable, friendly place and then This is something that works insanely well in Europe. I would say wooden toys of all sorts are just a great category to be in. Speaker 1: At some point, maybe you'll translate newsletters too, right? Speaker 2: Yes, at some point. I'm sure. Speaker 1: I want to see you translate Balcony Barbie. Speaker 2: That would be very interesting. Speaker 1: So, Jana, you're going to be speaking at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit in February, the virtual one, but so people will be able to catch you there and you've always got some great stuff. I remember one time you did a, wasn't even about translations, it's like you put all these hacks together or something like from, you'd learn from all your clients and all your stuff and it was like, Really, really cool stuff. So that's going to be exciting. But in the meantime, if someone wants to get a hold of you or find out more about your company or follow you or what's the best way to do that? Speaker 2: So if you if you guys like some of the content I shared today, I share a lot of that on LinkedIn, a lot of case studies, real time examples, live analysis of brands. I love doing that. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm building a community over there. And hopefully I reach, I don't know, like 15,000 followers this year. This is kind of something I'm kind of really big on. I love LinkedIn. I love everyone, what's everyone doing over there. And also you're welcome to check our website, which is ylt-translations.com, where you can see everything that we do. And apart from translations, I just want to mention that we also offer this really interesting report that will help We decide which marketplace to sell on next. It's pretty unique. It's a manual report and it has a bunch of data that I'm sure that your team cannot do or perform because it's a different language they're dealing with. Speaker 1: How do I get that? It's on your website? Speaker 2: It's on our website, yeah. So we can go to www.wildt-translations.com. It's like this little amore. Speaker 1: A-M-O-R-E. Speaker 2: A-M-O-R-E. No, A-M-O-R. It stands for Amazon Marketplace Opportunity Report. So we love to spread love of international marketplaces with our little report. Speaker 1: Awesome. So Y-L-T dash translations with an S dot com forward slash AMOR, A-M-O-R. Speaker 2: Yes, correct. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, Jana, I really appreciate you coming on today and don't play so hard to get the next time and we'll have to have you back. Speaker 2: You can always get me online. Speaker 1: Thanks again for coming. Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. Speaker 1: As you can see with Jana, there's several opportunities, I mean tons of opportunities actually outside the United States. If you want to venture out and give the waters a test in Europe or Japan or anywhere else where Amazon has a marketplace and her company YLT Translations is probably the best in the space that can help you make that transition smoothly and give you the best chance of success. So if you're thinking about doing that, go out there and give it a shot. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We've got the Russian Brainiac coming on, Isabella Ritz, next week. So it's gonna be a great episode. So hopefully you'll be back for that next Thursday. In the meantime, don't forget, BillionDollarSellers.com is the newsletter. And our words of wisdom I'm gonna part with you today with are, who knows you is more important than who you know. Who knows you is more important than who you know. Have a great week. We'll see you next Thursday.