International Engineering with Joel Sahleen

Joel Sahleen was the Director of International Engineering and Principal International Engineer at Domo, Inc. He specializes in the internationalization and localization of distributed, cloud-based, software as a service application, and in the development of cost-effective, data-driven product internationalization and localization programs. Now he continues his professional life as Internationalization Engineering Manager - Platform at Spotify. Before getting involved in tech, Joel served as a Teaching and Research Fellow in the Departments of East Asian Languages and Literature and Religious Studies at Stanford University, where he helped run the Classical Chinese program, and taught courses on early Chinese philosophy, history, and religion. Joel is passionate about advancing the internationalization and localization of the internet and frequently speaks at industry conferences and events. He lives outside Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife, two sons, and two dogs. KEY TAKEAWAYS International Engineering lays the foundations of internationalization and localisation. It functions as a bridge. There are some important metrics that should be tracked in order to develop the system and do the better for your international journey. Everything is linked to each other; however, we should also know their differences. BEST MOMENTS “International Engineering is a term we use for our team because our team kinda straddles the boundary between internationalization engineering or getting the software ready to be localised you could say and localisation engineering which is developing all the infrastructure and the automation necessary to get text from the application hold out of the application and send translation and then return and integrated into the build.” “We found that not only is that the language issue that people need to be able to use our product in different languages but there are also very many regional differences, for example, date formatting, number formatting, and the internationalization is really aware that happens. We believe that’s important.” “Some of the metrics we track are around registered international users, people have who actually gone in and said ‘I want to use this product in another language or locale. And then we track the activity on our side of people who are using the product in other languages and locales. We actually have a great kinda combined metric that we use that we call ‘localisation fit’ where we look at the browser language that people are accessing our product in and then we look at the language that they actually use the product in, and we see where those match up and those don’t. That can rebuild a lot of opportunities for us into where we should go next.” “Software development is more than internationalization, internationalization is more than localisation, localisation is more than translation, and translation is just more than language.” ABOUT THE HOST Levent Yildizgoren, the author of 'Good Business in any Language', is an award-winning entrepreneur, localisation professional, and a PRINCE2 qualified project manager. CONTACT METHOD Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leventyildizgoren/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/yildizgoren IG: https://www.instagram.com/levent.yildizgoren/ ABOUT THE GUEST Joel Sahleen is now Internationalization Engineering Manager - Platform at Spotify. Joel is passionate about advancing the internationalization and localization of the internet and frequently speaks at industry conferences and events. CONTACT METHOD https://www.spotify.com/ VALUABLE RESOURCES Do you have any questions about translation, localization, or international growth? Visit TTC website: https://ttcwetranslate.com/ Take your business global with the 5-step LINGO modal! Purchase 'Good Business in any Language' on Amazon now: https://cutt.ly/2ORR