The Future of Language Jobs with tbo.’s Charles Campbell

Charles Campbell joins SlatorPod to talk about the evolution of tbo. from a translation company to a diversified business, exploring challenges, strategies, and the impact of industry changes.

The President and Founder discusses the talent landscape, mentioning challenges such as layoffs, hiring fluctuations, and the impact of political changes in Argentina. He shares insights on the local economy, the government’s actions, and the business outlook amidst these changes.

Charles emphasizes the importance of adaptability and flexibility in today’s job market, particularly as AI integration reshapes traditional roles. He mentions the need for workers to be open to evolving job descriptions and not overly resistant to incorporating AI into their roles.

In discussing the changing role of project managers, Charles highlights the shift towards automation and the need for language service providers to embrace technology while maintaining a human touch.

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While tbo. embraces technological advancements, Charles acknowledges he passed on opportunities such as data annotation, highlighting the challenges of aligning business strategies with emerging trends.

The podcast touches on the rebranding process undertaken by tbo. and establishing business units like tbotalent, tbodev, and tbolab. Charles highlights the importance of a meaningful, simplified brand name that aligns with the company’s diverse service offerings.

Transcript

Florian: Today on the podcast, we welcome Charles Campbell. Charles is the Founder and President of tbo. They provide services in localization, game testing, training, and talent services with a newish company that started tbotalent. Hi, Charles, and thanks so much for joining today. Where does this podcast find you today? We always ask that, what country, what city?

Charles: Yeah, strangely enough, I’m at home in the Republic of Córdoba in Argentina. I say the Republic of Córdoba, it’s not an independent country, actually, but we feel like we’re a country within a country here in Córdoba, Argentina.

Florian: Wow. Is that a recent feeling or has that always been the case?

Charles: They used to call Córdoba an island within the country about 30 years ago and politically, the province of Córdoba is a little bit further to the right of what the general national politics are, but it’s just a joke. Córdoba is very export-focused. The city where I live has a million and a half people, and a lot of businesses are focused on global markets. It’s a very globalized local economy.

Florian: Have recent developments with Milei, have they been good for or different from how it’s been on a national level, or you barely felt it?

Charles: Definitely nobody could say that barely felt Milei because our new President is extremely determined to achieve results. He was selected with 57% of the vote, so he has a popular mandate. Very theoretical guy, very little experience in politics. He’s trying to steamroll through a lot of changes, and I don’t think anyone can say they haven’t felt it yet. For now, the local economy is hurting as he’s readjusting things and people, I think, across the board are hurting. But I guess medium and long-term expectation is that we will pull through and that significant changes will be made. In terms of our business, we’re a globalized business and we’re very optimistic at all times and we’re expecting a good, healthy year. I wouldn’t say a record year, but a healthy year, and we’re working hard. AI, technology, globalization, all sorts of changes happening around the world. The local politics is not the most significant driver for us in terms of determining business mood, but I will say it’s got the country in a flurry, put it that way. Whether or not he will be successful, as the English would say, the proof is in the pudding. It could go either way. He could be a phenomenal success or a phenomenal failure at this point. The jury’s out.

Florian: Because you’d be considered an export business, I’d assume. I would assume that your client footprint domestically is rather small and you’re very much exposed to global markets. So you’re, in a sense, an exporter.

Charles: Yes, that is exactly true. The previous Argentinian governments for a very long time put in currency controls and all sorts of different mechanisms, some of them almost Cuban-like in their implementation that made business progressively more difficult for local language service providers. Local language service providers became experts, absolute experts in navigating this mutating, I wouldn’t say evolving, I would say mutating government regulations. Basically, it got to the point where I would laugh it off and say, If you can make it in Argentina, you can make it anywhere. The current government has not dismantled those currency regulations yet. Although the discourse is certainly that they will, but they haven’t said when, so fingers crossed.

Florian: What got you to Argentina and into the language industry? Let’s look a little bit at your background.

Charles: About 35 years ago, my mother decided to dump me at the house of some friends of ours who were Chileans living in New Zealand. I’m from New Zealand. She dumped me with these Chileans for three weeks so she could go hiking around the volcanoes of Hawaii. I had a wonderful time with the Chilean family, speaking Spanish with them and eating Chilean food in New Zealand. It was a totally Chilean way of life within a New Zealand household, and I loved it. I had traveled my whole life with my father in the US, my mother in New Zealand. I was a well-traveled kid, and living with these Chileans for three weeks while my mother was on an esoterical adventure in Hawaii, gave me a feeling for Latin America. I registered to do a student exchange, and you had to choose a couple of countries. I chose Argentina and Chile. I ended up in Argentina in a small town. Long story short, that is where I met the mother of my first three of my four children, and I was married for a very long time, longer than I can remember. That’s what brought me to Argentina. Then at the end of the 1990s, thinking about what I said about an export-oriented economy, the local economy was very unreliable, very up and down. Before it became fashionable to do so, I set up a language service provider focused on exporting translation. We’re talking in the year 2000, approximately. That involved to what was later Translation Back Office and then tbo. over time. Why did I do that? Because Córdoba had great fiber optic internet connections for the 1990s, great hospitals, great airport, and most importantly of all, great local universities. Either the public government-funded universities are free. I mean, nothing’s free, but free for the students, taxpayers fund it. Very demanding, academically speaking, so five-year university degrees, very demanding. I felt like my degree in New Zealand was like a walk in the park compared to what these guys were doing here in Córdoba. Facilities quite run down, but in terms of the teaching quality and the academic level is very, very good. And the private universities are very affordable. I mean, by American standards, it would make you laugh, or I don’t know, in Switzerland. That was the main reason, the universities, the talent pool, which I think links back to the central theme of this call today. That’s why I started tbo. in Córdoba. We branched out over the years. We opened up an office in Peru in 2011, Ukraine and Vietnam in 2017 and 2018. Mexico last year. So a total of Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Ukraine, and Vietnam. The newest office is in Mexico, and that is because of nearshoring from the United States. Mexico is geopolitically hot, even though they have a government that’s difficult to decipher. It’s good for business. And American investment is pouring into Mexico as American investment cools a bit on China. You only have to cool a little bit on China to make a huge impact on other countries because Mexico only has one-tenth of the population of China or less. Why Vietnam? Well, Vietnam was to provide a global service, to have an Asian connection. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful team in Vietnam. Ukraine was to do the same. From Eastern Europe, we originally had an office. Don’t have an office anymore because a bomb fell right in front of the office. It was in downtown Kyiv. We moved everybody out to, originally to grandma’s farmhouse and all sorts of different options. Now more stable, but we distributed the team out rather than being at one central office. I’m really excited to say I’m going to Kyiv, literally just booked my tickets. I’m going to Kyiv between SlatorCon and LocWorld. In one month’s time, I’ll be there, and I’ll tell you how it is from Kyiv.

Florian: How do you go to Kyiv now? You have to go to Poland then take the train, or how does that work?

Charles: I’ve done a lot of research on that because I have a really tight schedule between SlatorCon and the French Open in Paris and LocWorld. So what I do is I fly to Warsaw from Paris, and then you can take a bus. Not sure how far the seats go back on the bus, but it’s got Wi-Fi. It’s like 15 hours if there’s no problems on the border. Or you can take a train, which is anywhere between 13 and 17 hours. It has sleeper bunks, like straight out of the movies, the old movies. I’m forward to it. I think I’m taking a bus to Kyiv, and then I’m taking the train back. It’s going to be exciting. The reason why you can’t fly, of course, is because there is a very serious risk that an airliner could be shot down, and that has happened in the past. That’s why there’s no flights. But we’ve had team members from our team in Ukraine come in and out by bus and train in the past, and it’s been pretty seamless.

Florian: All the best with that. It’ll be great to see the team. Talking about team you, it feels, at least to me, recently or maybe a year ago, launched a new brand. Is that correct? Or a new company called tbotalent. I want to talk a bit about that, how you started that, why you started that, and then also want to hear your thoughts on the talent landscape as we’re in 2024. What roles are currently in high demand? What’s happening there? There’s been some layoffs on the tech side, but also translators being insecure. There’s just so many moving parts, so big question. Over to you.

Charles: The talent landscape is choppy water. There’s layoffs, there’s a lot of people being hired, and then there’s a lot of wait and see where we’re not hiring and we’re just waiting to see. My impression is that there’s no reason to be concerned, that I do believe that there are jobs out there for everyone, not necessarily exactly the job that you would want, but this is kind of a flux period, a transition period, coming from a really hot, overheated economy where nobody could find people and workers could ask the Earth and get it or jump from one company to another two or three times in a year, back to putting feet back on the ground. I still believe it’s a near full employment for our industry or even full employment. The only people who are unemployed are people who are momentarily moving from one company to another. I don’t think there’s any kind of systemic issue of lack of opportunities in our industry. Talent is not easy to find anywhere, except in locations where you might not necessarily want talent or need it for whatever geopolitical reasons or security reasons. For example, I get a lot of resumes from Lebanon or Pakistan, which is not a place where I could think about establishing a facility or confidently hiring remotely. I also get resumes from India offering Swedish, Japanese, and German translations that don’t provide me with a degree of security or confidence that would enable me to move forward there either. But generally speaking, in terms of Latin America, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, we find them because we have an extraordinary reach, deep local roots, 20 plus years of experience in every Latin American country. We also have a lot of deep experience in Eastern Europe and in Southeast Asia because of our local offices there. I don’t think it’s easy. It’s not a walk in the park, but it’s definitely not the overheated economy we had coming out of the pandemic where everyone was high on the wave. You got to work for growth at the moment, and workers have got to work for opportunities, and employers have got to work to find workers and so forth. There’s no rising tide, it seems to me. Now, in terms of tech in particular, that is where I see a lot of demand. In terms of skill sets, also, life sciences never seems to go away, a very persistent need for life sciences skills. General localization, I think, is also still there and it’s still growing. What I would see is from the trends that I see from talking to many different employers that we work with in many different countries, is that they do want people to be flexible. If you get hired for a role and that role evolves, run with it. It’s not a time to be overly picky or overly pretentious about being too rigid with your job description. That’s not a universal recommendation on my part, but it’s definitely something I’ve observed that employers are wanting you to be flexible. Anyone who is AI phobic, may be unnecessarily being so because everyone’s saying AI with everything. It’s a ham and cheese AI sandwich. AI is being put into everything. Two companies will merge and they say they’re creating an AI powerhouse, and you don’t necessarily know if either of them really knows anything about AI. I think that’s also coming down to Earth a bit. But I think on the talent side, talent, i.e. workers, perhaps need to simmer down if an employer mentions AI, it doesn’t mean that you need to earn double if they don’t mention AI. If they mention AI, you don’t need to freak out that you’re suddenly not going to be a linguist anymore, or you’re not going to be a quality manager anymore, or a project manager anymore, and you’re going to be doing prompt engineering all day long. Lots of clients and lots of different fires, I think, for employers and for talent. It’s still a very positive market. I’ve lived through periods of recession when unemployment shot up and everybody knew somebody who lost a job, and that is not the reality today. If you lose your job today, I think you’re very well positioned to get another job very quickly.

Florian: With tbotalent, do you guys staff? Do you guys headhunt, both? Or what’s the focus there?

Charles: We’ve been providing talent to the translation, interpreting, and localization industry since 2003. That’s when we first placed the first project manager with the first client. The service that we provide is not recruitment per se. We do do recruitment from time to time, but there are other people out there, I believe, that have more experience in recruitment as a standalone service. What we provide is what we used to call managed services, but now we call talent, which is an ongoing service where we provide our clients with talent in any number of different job descriptions. Last count, there were almost 50 different job descriptions, so the full spectrum of quality positions, customer service positions, project management positions, program management positions, talent management positions, engineering positions, and it just grows and grows, sales positions, and so forth. Now we’re seeing more and more positions come up that you never even heard of two years ago. But it all started out with project managers, and that was certainly our forte for a very long time before things diversified. What we were doing at the time, way back in 2004, 2003, was to provide project managers to language service providers in the United States or the United Kingdom, to start with, and then Canada, and then it just kept growing into other countries, to manage their projects. We would literally have clients that did not have an operational structure in their country of operation. They had a sales structure, and they would outsource basically the entire operational structure to us. A vendor manager, project manager, whatever, and so forth. This grew and grew and grew. We have clients that literally hire us for one person, and we have a couple of clients that hire us to something like 70, 80 people. This has evolved over time, and we’ve come to navigate many different issues that arise in the markets where we operate. We’re talking about Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. They’re all emerging markets. We were going to go to Africa as well. I went to Tanzania right before the pandemic, three weeks before the pandemic. Unfortunately, the pandemic cut that off, and we never really got back to it. But still got a great resource space there, but didn’t actually get the office on the ground. What we’re doing is providing an ongoing service. If the talent that we provide has a medical issue, whether that be physical or mental, spiritual, existential, there’s a lot going on in people’s heads and bodies, we replace that person at no cost to our client, and we provide the person, in almost all cases, with support to overcome whatever issue they are facing. One of the central themes behind this is that a lot of our customers are in the US, where employers are not used to carrying people when they have some medical issue, mental health, physical health, maternity leave. This is like a non-issue in most of the world, but in the US, it’s a big issue. What we generally do is we bridge the gap by providing more benefits than what our clients would provide. What that does is it creates a very long-standing loyalty between us and the talents that we work with. Also, the US and the UK have a reputation for being very quick to hire and also quick to fire. People in emerging markets, so I’m talking Ukraine and the countries around Ukraine, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and also in Vietnam, they’re used to a more long-term, we could call it French-style approach to employment or German-style, where when things get rough, employers tend to try and moderate the impact of the peaks and valleys on workers and on clients and can often carry people through crises, reassign them to other jobs and so forth. I’m generalizing here, but for workers working for an American client has a risk because they know that Amazon can wake up and smell the coffee and fire 8,000 people in one day and create a ripple effect. Whereas I don’t think you’ve heard of any French or German or Swiss companies firing quite in that dramatic manner. Maybe I’m misinformed, but there’s a general feeling out there that American companies are quick to hire and quick to fire. What we do there is we provide, it’s not 100% guarantee, but it’s basically 99%, that if we have talents that are working for an American client, and that client loses business or gets into some financial turbulence or whatever and lets them go, and it’s not related to performance, we can almost 99% guarantee that they will be recycled into another position with another client. That represents a big value added for the talents. They feel security and that’s great. I personally love working in the talent business. This is something that I have personally been very deeply involved in for the last 15 years as it has grown and grown. I mean, literally today, the talent business at tbotalent is getting close to being 57% of our overall business, with the other 43% being multilingual translation.

Florian: Quite a successful pivot there. Congrats. When you look at these roles, we’re talking a lot about, obviously, 24 months now, it’s AI, AI, AI. Give me maybe a couple of examples of actually new AI-related roles that are in real demand, not like this maybe or some iteration of post-editing. Can you give me a couple of examples there? Then do you see differences between the vendor and the buyer side?

Charles: Obviously, the existing roles are having the letters AI tacked onto them. You have a quality manager as an AI quality manager. Whether or not that actually involves a significant role change depends on the employer and how things go. But it’s like 25 years ago or maybe 30 years ago, people started changing from the word translation to localization. Everybody who was in localization was up on the pedestal. What was the difference? A lot of people struggled to actually explain the difference. In this case, yeah, there is a very clear difference. There’s many different roles that are changing significantly. You have obviously prompt engineering. You have a lot of quality assurance-related roles that are being renamed things like graders, raters, evaluators, rather than being a more heavily linguistically oriented quality assurance manager who is an absolute expert in the language that they passionately feel about, that they study to work with so deeply and detailedly. Now, I think AI roles are often a little bit more aloof from the very specific love of language, and you’re mixing love of language with love of technology. Not everybody can handle that. Some people feel that if you love a language, then you’re somehow opposed to technology, which is silly, but that mentality is out there. But I think that particularly, there’s going to be a lot of creation of roles as well for engineering positions, and that translation, interpreting, and localization companies are going to need to beef up their engineering stuff. That is definitely something that we at tbo. are already noticing. That may enable them to reposition themselves upstream, not as a technology provider per se, like, I don’t know, Plunet or XTM or technology companies, but as service companies that are extremely tech savvy. I see a lot of that happening.

Florian: Now, there’s been a ton of process automation over the past, even since I’ve been in this industry, 10, 15 years. Now, what about the project manager role that was clearly defined maybe 10, 15 years ago? You got the job, you allocate it to the different linguists, you manage some of the TMS side. How has that evolved over the past, let’s say, 2-3 years, if at all? Have you seen a major shift there in just the general things that PMs do?

Charles: We’ve literally gone from sticky notes and Excel in the 1990s to either automated or semi-automated processes today. I think that automation today is more of a discussion about how automated you are rather than whether or not you are automated or not. If you’re not automated in any way, then you have a choice, which is, I think, start automating to some degree or another without losing the essence of your value and your core business, your core service, without losing the human touch or gradually wither on the vine. I don’t see anyone dying overnight, but I do see people plateauing because they are not willing to invest the time and sit down and get their heads around it. I think project managers today, there’s different companies with different degrees of automation. If you have, for example, systems like Plunet and BeLazy, you interconnect them, that will semi-automate a lot of different things. But at the end of the day, if something goes wrong, it doesn’t help if you tell your customer, oh, I’m so sorry, that was my automation that did it. You’re still responsible. It’s a tricky point to determine exactly how much of a human touch you want. But you certainly don’t want to be typing in data that can be automatically uploaded. I’m personally a very creative person in terms of writing emails and I can talk for hours as you’re probably noticing right now. But a lot of people will sit there and stare at the screen when they have to write an email. It’s a bit of AI that would really help them write a quicker email. I think if you’re not automating, then you should be automating. It’s up to you to how much you want to do. At tbo., we have a business unit. We have many different business units that we’ve created brands for, like tbotalent. I mean, tbotalent is a brand, but the actual service has been around since 2004. We also have tbodev, which is our development division, and that is newer and it is growing. tbodev’s number one task is to develop and implement automation within tbo. What we’ve noticed is that it has allowed us to grow at the same rate, i.e. fast, but headcount is not growing at the same rate. It wouldn’t be possible to continue to add headcount at the same rate. That is because we’re automating more and more, particularly in project management. Then the tbodev team is also looking at other areas of the company where the automations can be implemented. We use external tools, but we also have our own in-house big nerd who understands all this stuff and is willing to pull things apart. Then, of course, there’s someone like me where I’m a creative person and not exactly the automation type, but I go with it. I go with it. Don’t resist, but I do add my own spice to the mix.

Florian: I want to talk a bit about another area that’s gone really well for some LSPs in the past couple of years or maybe four or five years is data annotation, language annotation, but other annotation stuff as well. Is that something that you’ve gone into as well? Usually, the crowds had been in the past bigger, like the pools of freelancers. But yeah, it used to be, or it still is like something that’s quite natural for language service providers. Is that something you’ve gone into?

Charles: To be 100% transparent with you, I think we missed that wave. I mean, we provide that service, but it wasn’t a game changer for us at tbo., just because you can’t focus on everything simultaneously. You have to pick and choose what you want to invest your time and money in and where your values are and so forth. And data annotation took off big time a few years ago, and I think it’s subsiding a bit now. It wasn’t a rock star moment for us. We’ve done it, but it wasn’t our primary focus.

Florian: Now, you mentioned the different brands that you have. You went through quite a deep, at least from the outside, deep rebranding process. I believe it was last year, 2023. That must have been challenging. Tell us a bit more about the primary challenges, lessons learned. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are maybe planning something similar and could need to help.

Charles: That’s a really good question. Very interesting one, too. My personal email was [email protected], which is like a 50-letter email. In English, it’s relatively easy to say [email protected], but in Spanish, it was an absolute nightmare. I would have to spell it out letter by letter. I was going crazy. My team had been pushing to rebrand the company to tbo. for some time. When I say my team, my team was all younger than me. I’m like the veteran, 48, and a whole bunch of guys in their 20s and 30s pushing to rejuvenate, simplify, refresh our image, so we changed to tbo. Unfortunately, there’s a travel agency in India called tbo., so they have tbo.com. So we’re tbo.group, which is great because we are a group of brands. They presented to me the idea. I mean, this was a very much bottom-up process. I said, go for it, work on it, create a team, interdisciplinary team, so someone from graphic design, someone from sales, someone from marketing, someone from admin, and of course, our COO, Alejandro Serfaty. They worked on it together and they came back and presented to me the idea of creating sub-brands. We have tbotalent, tbodev, we have tbolab, which is our educational unit where we train young students that are looking for project management certification and so forth. We have several different units that are designed to reflect the focus of the company. The focus of the company is translation, talent, training, teams, testing, and travel. The six T’s. The travel is actually for me, but that’s a joke. It’s the six T’s. Everything is about the T’s at tbo. What does the T stand for? Of course, if our name was Translation Back Office, but 57% of our business was not translation, the name was a hindrance. It’s the same way you have in the 1990s, people will call their company ABC Translation because you would have the phone book and ABC would be at the beginning of the phone book, or people would call themselves 1800 Interpreting because it was all about what you dialed on your phone. Of course, those are no longer relevant in today’s world. Translation Back Office had become obsolete for us because we were providing so many different services. One of the biggest services we provide today, for example, is rolling out teams in different countries for our clients, whether or not that be Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, or Latin America. Clients reach out to us and ask us to create a team of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 people. And literally within 30 to 60 days, they roll out the job descriptions and we run with it. They also call us to create a one person position. So of course, that deployment of service and leverage of local footprint and knowledge was not in any way reflected by Translation Back Office. So the name change was a simplification, a rejuvenation. Everyone got involved. I signed off. I fell in love with it about midway through, wasn’t initially enamored of the process. But then I went in big time and it was a group effort and it’s still going on. We’re in the process of redoing our main website now and rolling out different services. tboplay, for example, is our games localization division and so forth. Really exciting. Now it’s impossible to think of Translation Back Office. But this is something that other companies have done as well. At some point in the past, it was considered to be good to have a really long name. Proctor & Gamble. I don’t know. PricewaterhouseCoopers, at one time, I think it was PricewaterhouseCoopers brand or Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. I mean, whoever knows what KPMG stands for. It doesn’t matter. Yeah, so there you go. That was our version.

Florian: I think your rebranding worked quite well. Also, the origins are still coming through with the tbo., so it does have a history to it, right? But it’s short enough to add a lot of other stuff to it, like talent, loc, lab, et cetera.

Charles: If we’d started out as tbo., maybe people would not have understood what we were about or what we were for. But because we started out as Translation Back Office and we made a name for ourselves as Translation Back Office, it wasn’t too difficult to translate to tbo. I mean, does anyone remember what HBO stands for? It’s Home Box Office. They didn’t start out as HBO, or maybe they did. I mean, I was a kid, but you know what I mean? It worked out really well. It’s particularly good now because now we are launching some of the newer divisions like tbodev, tboplay, and it would have been virtually impossible to do that under the Translation Back Office name. Everyone was on board. Everyone contributed. It was great.

Florian: But it’s a long process, so let’s say an LSP is trying to do something similar, it probably does take half a year to a year, and then probably another year to really percolate through. We need to also push the marketing side so people recognize it fairly quickly.

Charles: Maybe in the past, there was too much emphasis on the logo itself. Some people do a rebrand because they have an old-looking logo. If you’re going to do a rebrand of the logo, why not do a rebrand of the name? There are a lot of companies in our industry that are letters, like ALC, ABC, ATC. There’s so many things that are almost the same. The same happened, I think, with Juntos. Juntos is the organization that represents translation, interpreting, and localization companies in Latin America and the Caribbean. I’m one of the founding members, I’m on the board. I speak on behalf of Juntos a lot of events. Juntos was originally the Association of Language Companies of Latin America and the Caribbean. We couldn’t even remember our own name. It was ALCALS, or ALSALC. I literally had to look it up, and many times I got it wrong. And then we had a brainstorming event, and we say, what are we about? And we also had the challenge of Spanish and Portuguese, Latin America, Spanish, Portuguese. Juntos is spelled exactly the same way in Portuguese, it’s Juntos, it’s just pronounced differently, which, of course, means together in English. That’s exactly what juntos is about. It’s about bringing people together from Latin America and the Caribbean and about having voice. Unless you’re Google or you can blast the world with so many resources that you can have a made up name, I personally think it’s better to have a name that means something and that is a concept or is easy to remember. That’s why I like Translation Back Office, because we were the translation back office. That was our exact business model in the name. Now we’re tbo., and the T means all those different things I mentioned. For me, that has a meaning. If you have billions of marketing dollars, you can call yourself whatever. In Silicon Valley, if you don’t have a silly sounding name, then you don’t have a name. It’s like you’re going to be worth more if you’re called something silly than if you’re called something sensible, just because it’s cool to make up a made up word. But that’s cool. It’s different for each company.

Florian: All right. Now it’s SlatorCon, French Open, Kyiv, and LocWorld. Then what else is on the map for 2024?

Charles: I’ve been at home now, home here in the Republic of Córdoba for about five weeks. It’s like, oh, my gosh, getting restless. The suitcases are gathering dust. I went to the ALC UnConference in February in Mexico, and that was great. Then I went to Juntos in Lima, Peru, where there were 150 people attending, up from 55, 56 in Rio de Janeiro the year before. Next year is going to be Mexico City in March 15, 2025. Then after Juntos, I just stayed home. Stayed home, family, end of summer here in Argentina. A lot of work to be done. But next I’m going to Uruguay next week. Uruguay is just next to Argentina. It’s our little South American Switzerland. Then I’m going to Buenos Aires for a Loc drinks event. Never want to miss a drink. Then I will be back here in Córdoba for a couple of weeks, and then I will be in London for SlatorCon. Very excited to be attending. Never attended before. We’ll be exhibiting, too. Then some time off. I’m traveling with my daughter who’s 13 and my mother who’s 81. We are going to reconnect in London with my mother’s long lost sister from whom she was separated at birth. I mean, that is a story. I’ll let you know how that goes because these two old ladies look exactly the same, except my mother has a New Zealand accent and her sister has a British accent. It’s very interesting. I’m going to write a book about it. I’m not going to write a book about the language industry because I’ve signed too many NDAs, but I’ll write a book about my mother meeting her long lost sister. Then the French Open, then Kyiv, then LocWorld, then home, 10 Days, and then I’m going to the Brazilian BLISS conference in Rio de Janeiro for the Brazilian Language Industry Association, where I’ll be speaking. Then, gosh, that’s all that’s on the horizon for now. But I’m sure I’ll be at other events in North America, LocWorld in Monterey, maybe SlatorCon as well in the US, later in the year, ALC in Montreal.

Florian: If you want to double-dip, we’re in Menlo Park on September 5th.

Charles: What a great location. That sounds like a good deal. tbo. has a lot of clients in the area, California in general. I lived in Sausalito when I was a kid. We’re talking the 1980s when you could actually buy a house for $300,000, believe it or not. Now you could buy a tree for $300,000. When I lived in Sausalito, yeah, that was cool. I love going back there. I’m sure I’ll be there, too.