Multilingual Connections

Airbnb sought to gain deeper insights into their diverse global user base through international community panels, aiming to better serve users across different cultures and regions.

Background

As a global company operating in nearly 200 countries, Airbnb's product needs to be intuitive across cultures and localized across languages. Prior user research had focused primarily on English-speaking users, creating a gap the research team was committed to closing.

When they launched the International Community Panels (IC Panels) — a six-month research initiative spanning nine non-English-speaking countries, conducted in week-long cycles — they needed a language partner who could move at the speed of their product development process. That's where Multilingual Connections came in.

Challenge

As Netflix was expanding its audience in the Middle East, they encountered challenges with localizing film and series titles, descriptions, and marketing content in a way that would resonate with Arabic speakers from a linguistically diverse region.

Background

Following the rapid growth of its global clientbase, dscout, a remote contextual research platform that uses a mobile app to capture in-the-moment experiences and make easy-to-share insights, needed better language support. With their app available in seven languages, dscout’s studio team required not only ongoing translation of its user research guidelines and prompts but also transcription and translation of its user responses back into English for analysis.

Challenge

So, dscout began looking for more than just a language provider – it needed a language partner, and one with research expertise that could meet the unique demands of its fast-paced, often complex workflows. Because research participants use the dscout app in a remote, unmoderated manner, a high-quality and precise translation in the local language is critical to the users’ understanding of what they are supposed to be doing and how they should respond to prompts.

The dscout research team then relies on the English translation of the responses, which participants submit in video and text, to understand participants’ ideas, thoughts, and experiences. The pace and size of the content is particularly hard to predict, so a quick turnaround is essential as is, of course, translation accuracy and the ability to work in multiple file types across languages.