India as a delivery hub is very significant for us: RWS Holdings CEO

Content and information is the heart of every business for RWS Holdings, a leading player in the language services and technology marketplace. Listed on AIM on the London Stock Exchange, RWS wants to expand its services into India, which is already a key part of its global delivery services. Its other India connection is the acquisition of Webdunia in 2020. Ian El-Mokadem, the company’s CEO, spoke with Shivani Shinde about the need for language services, the demand for linguists, and AI changing the market. Edited excerpts: 

What are the key offerings of RWS?

Our specialisation is in language, content and intellectual property. We blend people with increasingly capable technology. Our global headcount is 8,000 and we also have a network of 30,000 freelance linguists, giving us global coverage. We typically serve large global brands, doing business in multiple countries. Our business is spread into three verticals -- patent translations, technology and language services.

There are reasons why customers take our service. First, to connect meaningfully with customers, who increasingly want a very personalised experience and like to receive content which is attuned to them culturally. Second, to make sure that your content is also according to the device the customers use as the language changes. The third area is regulatory compliance. Our work, especially in the regulated industries division, is partly to help our clients maintain regulatory compliance.

How does AI impact, or has impacted, your industry?

AI in our industry is good news, because there aren’t enough linguists on the planet to localise the huge amount of content that is being created. You actually need technology to make linguists more productive. In many cases we use AI first to localise content for clients. Our linguists will then do further quality checks, to make sure all cultural references and industry terminologies are right. We are very active developers in that.

Our product, Language Weaver, was a pioneer in this category. If one does not embrace AI, the risk is that you may end up being a dated business model, and that’s why it’s tougher for smaller players now to compete with a human-only kind of offering.

Practically everything we do is tech-enabled. Our industry’s use of technology is very high, especially with AI for translation. For instance, when it comes to workflows, we have translation management and translation productivity tools. If we get a piece of work, it could be a document, video or voice. We structure it and then it goes to linguistic experts.

How do you see your products working in India?

India is an interesting market with 22 official languages. We work with a lot of linguists around the world. India is a very important market for us. We have an extensive global campus programme working all around the world to source talent for our industry. We’ve got some 1,000 people based in the country.

As a source of talent, both for linguists and technology talent, India is important. As a source of clients, it’s more of an emerging market. We will see more and more Indian multinationals leveraging expertise such as this to reach global audiences.

What trend do you see in the local market in India?

We’ve just completed a global survey and India was one of the markets that we particularly focused on. This covers 6,500 consumers across 13 countries globally, including India. Nearly half of global consumers expressed frustration at the dominance of English in dealing with global businesses. Nine of 10 consumers said that brands must show their understanding of national identity, culture and languages, if they really want to be trusted by consumers. In India, we found that was the peak, actually. India was an outlier in the survey for that reason.

Global brands are gradually adding languages to their localisation strategy. There are some other interesting trends around the Indian consumer. About a quarter of the respondents said they use five-plus devices a day to go online, and 65 per cent of Indian consumers spend over five hours online every day.

In India we are still building our client relationships. But otherwise, India as a delivery hub is significant to us. All our services are provided from here to global clients. Global brands increasingly want to be local in the Indian market, and they want us to do more work here. That was one of the reasons for the acquisition of Webdunia. We wanted to reinforce our skills and expertise around Indian and Southeast Asian languages, plus technology. And Webdunia ticked all the boxes.

Webdunia, very interestingly, had two divisions, language services and content technology services. That fits with RWS. On language services, Webdunia had expertise in Indian languages. So, the primary need was to acquire talent and knowledge for Indian languages.

How big is the language services and tech market?

It’s slightly over $49 billion, but it is a very large and fragmented industry. It’s divided into a few large players like ourselves, some mid-sized players and thousands of small, local businesses, and there is a theme around consolidation in the industry now.

Clients are increasingly preferring to deal with a couple of global players rather than have to manage a very complicated supply chain in different countries, but also because of technology and economies of scale.

With AI becoming an intrinsic part of every tech platform, what opportunities do you see?

A chunk of our technology practice involves training AI engines for our clients. We do provide our translation technology. Data training by companies is really something where we see a lot of growing opportunities. We just announced the launch of the TrainAI brand, which allows clients complete end-to-end data collection, data annotation, and data validation services for all types of AI data -- in any language, at any scale.

TrainAI offers clients access to RWS’s SmartSource community, an extensive, active pool of over 100,000 annotators and linguists, who provide AI data services in 400+ language variants across 175 countries. The community collects, annotates and validates any type of AI data, from text, audio, images and videos, to multilingual and synthetic data.

What are some of the trends driving your business?

The first is the explosion of content. Increasingly, we see more content coming at us and we’re producing a lot more content and that drives the need for it to be localised, so that it’s relevant to the audience as well as follows regulatory requirements. Regulation is driving a need for greater disclosure, and focus on quality. AI is the second area. AI is actually opening up new growth opportunities around content.

And finally, globalisation. We support our clients to grow and, and to take their services into new markets and into new communities within those markets.