#63 Alex Katsambas on Localizing Billions of Words in Luxury Fashion

In this week’s SlatorPod, Farfetch's Head of Linguistic Services, Alex Katsambas talks about the online luxury fashion platform’s localization model.

Alex talks about Farfetch’s internal teams, churning out billions of words annually, the importance of sustainability in content messaging, and why return-on-investment for localization cannot be measured immediately.

He shares insights into Farfetch’s approach to content differentiation, and explains why treating various content verticals differently is essential, particularly when thinking about integrating machine translation (MT).

Having already rolled out MT for two languages, Alex tackles expanding Farfetch’s use of MT in the coming months, and explains why MT is good news for human experts. He also discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by multilingual SEO.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week. Florian talks about DeepL smashing it in global traffic rankings, and adding 13 languages.

Esther shares some takeaways from a TechCrunch feature piece profiling media localization giant Iyuno, and picks out some key growth stats from an analysis of the Slator 2021 LSPI.