Greater than 5 minutes, my friend!
INDIE LOCALIZERS TEAM: MORE POWER TO INDIE TRANSLATORS
Cheers to the translator community from the Indie Localizers Team!
In this post, we’d like to introduce our team and sketch out some of our core values and views.
BLUE IS THE NEW COLOR OF INDIE
The main idea behind our team is that together we are more competitive than on our own. Our nouveau team wants to be more dynamic and reactive in today’s business landscape and, of course, we want to be more competitive. When we, freelance translators, work on our own, we stand little chance of getting a direct localization client since in most cases we can offer support for only one language.
As solo freelancers, we compete here with big companies that have the resources, and increasingly often the technology, to take on multi-language projects from top-bracket clients. Therefore, it’s much less headache for a client to hand over the job to a company that will manage simultaneous localization into several languages than to seek multiple translators from each target geography and manage all of them. This is unless we work as a team. Then, with the right approach, indie translators stand a good chance.
“Freelance translators are small grains of sand in the vast virtual world, but they can be seen differently being part of a team. IL platform places together professionals with associated activities. As a team, they are stronger and can give a better result for both clients and themselves. Good rates, good colleagues partnerships, and interesting projects in a friendly environment are our aims.”
Branca Amado,
English to Brazilian Portuguese Indie Localizer
https://branded.me/brancaamado
STEERING FREE
Our team was incepted three months ago out of the realization that things don’t have to be the way they are and out of the desire to be independent—take the helm of our careers in our own hands and not rely on anyone else’s whim or preferences. We know all too well that being mere freelancers in a pool of hundreds, if not thousands, of similar fellow translators employed by an agency, we are easily replaceable and our value, therefore, is diminished.
If we take a look deeper down, Indie Localizers embody a core principle which is a well-known old truth: Together we are more than the sum of us.
Our indie spirit has a liberating feeling to it, but we realize there are big challenges and risks associated with going solo.
“I think the IL project is innovative and challenging. I expect it will give me the opportunity to access more rewarding projects that I thought out of reach for a single freelancer, and reinforce the team spirit of freelance translators.”
Aurélie Perrin,
English to French Indie Localizer
LOCALIZERS, NOT TRANSLATORS
Because localization is a complex undertaking and there is a big room for very pricey errors, it should be done by localization specialists. As we say on our website, we are not translators, we are localizers. Individually, we all have years of experience localizing websites, apps, games, and all that jazz.
Although, being indies, we have to be more than just localizers and manage all the workflow on our own. Therefore, many of us have more than one role. We are social media marketers, project leads, accountants, client communication admins, SEOs, copywriters, web developers, testers, and graphic designers and illustrators.
LOCALIZERS, SEOS, DEVELOPERS, AND TESTERS
Because localization is much more than pure, linguistic translation and can get quite technical we’ve partnered with experienced SEOs and developers. Their job is to advise the clients (and us), perform SEO on the client’s product, and provide technical assistance when needed and as a premium feature. After all, being a localization team means being able to provide a comprehensive localization service so that the client doesn’t have to look elsewhere.
“My role in the team is that of a specialist with experience in video gaming; to deliver to the client top French localization and localization testing, to help them grow their businesses in my country, and to provide language support at any time. They have the privilege of having a team that meets their needs and solves their problems.”
Ophelie Tesseur,
French Localization Tester
http://realcapacity.wixsite.com/realcap
Initially, Indie Localizers were devised as a tight-knit team composed of translators passionate about localization. It was later on that we’ve on-boarded SEOs, testers, and developers to offer the client a more comprehensive service and give an extra edge to our indie team.
We want our clients come to us and not having to look elsewhere to cover their additional needs, such as SEO or dev support.
This is an important point and it was a nice move we made, as entering new markets is not just about localizing a client-facing UI and translating top-level marketing content into more languages. It’s about tuning up your product or service to new cultures in new locales, making it easily discoverable in SERPs by local people, grabbing their hearts and souls, and ensuring you are where your prospects are, or going to be, by localizing your online ads, social media profiles, landing pages, email campaigns etc. All along we aim to make the whole localization project as smooth as possible, in part by ruling out an unnecessary hassle and extra time the client would have to spend finding non-linguistic specialists when they need SEO or tech support.
LOCALIZATION AND SEO ARE INSEPARABLE
Localization without a proper SEO research seems unimaginable in the age when being on the first page of search results is equal to whether your clients will know about your existence or not.
Take keyword localization for app stores that so many language companies offer today. It’s clear that simply translating all keywords won’t work. The idea is to research the best ranking keywords that local people actually use and then implement them in all localizations, website structure or store metadata, descriptions etc. Not just localize keywords from language A to language B. Therefore, the whole term “keyword localization” doesn’t reflect the reality, as keywords are not being localized, but rather researched and implemented. “Keyword research and implementation in localization” seems to be a more proper term.
And many language companies do not offer SEO service at all, or simply advise clients to “do their homework,” meaning do a research on their own or hire third-party SEOs. While this can be done by a freelance localizer with proper SEO skills, it’s best to employ a market-savvy SEO expert who’ll share research results with the localizer and the localizer will deliver an optimized product to the client. This is the workflow that our dynamic team adopted and will be following.
Comprehensive doesn’t mean extensive. Although we offer a comprehensive localization, Indie Localizers do not currently support such services as voice-overs and redesign.
TRANSPARENCY
Besides the core services (l10n, SEO, l10n testing, and dev support), we offer our clients something that few language companies do—total leverage over who is going to work on their project. The client may visit our personal pages and actually review qualification of each localizer, SEO, developer, or tester and only then decide whether they want to award a project to us. Also, we give the client a chance to pick the team members who they think are best-suited for their project. And that’s a pretty cool thing about IL. Our team is based on transparency and trust.
And because we don’t have offices with the numerous staff clients don’t have to pay overhead. They can be sure the pricing reflects only services they need and is not pushed up to cover the staff’s salary.
To learn more about us and see our faces, visit Our Team page on our brand-new website that we’ve built using exclusively our own talent and have recently happily launched.
The Indie Localizers Team,
One Team To Take You Global
Nixie Adams 
Gert Van Assche 
Yuliya Kinash 
Hey Artem and the team!
Congrats on launching, this seems like a great idea! As a matter of fact I had a similar idea in the past (even with similar name, haha), but had to put it on hold on the account of me being involved into so many side projects. Working in a team with like-minded people where responsibility (and hopefully revenue) is shared equally is a great alternative to running a full-fledged translation agency. Plus it seems like you have other specialists on team (like SEO experts) which is a great competitive advantage.
I wish other translators realized that their best bet is joining forces in order to compete in this ever-growing market.
I also would like to remind you that excessive self-advertisement is not allowed on The Open Mic. Please, see our Site Rules for more details: link to theopenmic.co
The whole idea of publishing on The Open Mic is to bring something valuable to the translation community. Yes, your idea seem to be intriguing, but it might put people off because it’s an advertisement of your company.
I’m not going to remove this post because you’ve probably spend a lot of time writing it, I just want to warn you that our community probably won’t be happy with it and there’s a high chance no one will share, read or comment on it.
When you’re trying to use content marketing in order to promote and sell your services online, the smartest approach is not to try to sell or promote anything at all. When you’re writing a piece of content like this on, ask yourself one simple question: how can this help people?
And since you’re a team of localization professionals there’s a variety of ways you could be helpful both to the translation community and your potential customers. For example, you can publish articles about all the difficulties localizers face when working with clients and how to overcome them and make your work more efficient. Or cover the technical side of localization by publishing articles about the process and the workflow of localization or how translators can work with non-standard file formats or what tools they coon use to translate json files, for example.
But by bluntly advertising your services you’re probably not going to go very far because it’s been done before and most people and business have developed a filter for ads like this.
Just my few cents. I hope you don’t mind that I shared some feedback publicly.
Best of luck with Indie Localizers! I really hope it will take off and take this industry by storm.
Thanks, Dmitry, for not removing the post. I didn’t intend it as an ad targeted at clients, but rather as a community announcement. It even addresses the translator community. But it can be seen as an ad, I see your point. Thanks again, good luck too! Artem