GTE Localize

GTE Localize is a fast-growing translation and localization agency, providing comprehensive services for all major languages in the world. We also offer other language services including Media Localization, Interpretation, and Data Collection and Annotation.

At the beginning of our journey, GTE Localize focused on translation and localization services for all Southeast Asian languages and other major Asian languages. After 5 years, we have grown quickly from a regional agency to a global one through continuously expanding our network of reliable linguists to cover Asian, European, and South American languages.

By 2021, GTE localize has three offices in Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia, with about 40 full-time staff and a network of 1000 native linguists around the globe.
Our clients are global companies with businesses in multiple foreign markets. With our constant hard work, GTE Localize has become a go-to language service partner for hundreds of B2B clients worldwide and 80% of our clients come back to us after our initial contract has been completed.

Personally, I am the CEO of the company. Regardless of my title, I have been managing multiple roles during the last 4 years, including PM, Account Manager, Sales, and Marketing Manager. I don’t think it’s something strange for a young company like us in which the leader has to roll up the sleeves and cover any gap in the operation.  Of course, I have also been in charge of the big picture along the way, including establishing a strategy and supervising the entire company. However, the CEO part only accounts for my biggest workload recently when the operational team has been quite mature.

It’s pretty simple. Back in 2017, I had been in this industry for about 3 years and had worked for 2 different language agencies. I realized that the industry was a suit for me, and it had great potentials. However, some values I was seeking at work could not be found at those 2 companies. Thus, I decided to go ahead and build something on my own.

Actually, we’re combining the two models. GTE Localize has both a team of senior in-house linguists to handle frequently requested language pairs and a network of 1200+ freelance translators from all over the world to meet clients’ diverse requests for languages, services, and deadlines. All our linguists are required to have at least 5 years of experience working full-time as a translator. In fact, the average years of experience of our in-house translator team are 8.2 years.

Personally, I think differentiation is not a very common strategy in this industry. For us, we differentiate ourselves by outperforming the competitors. When a client thinks about GTE Localize, they think about an agency with a very high level of quality and deadline compliance. At the same time, we do our best to be competitive at price. Overall, it’s still the classic tri-angle: Quality-Deadline-Cost, but we push each element to the maximum for our clients.

Quality
You need two things to make up high quality: good input – or qualified linguists in our case, and good process – or a strict project management procedure.

Besides working with a team of 5-year+ experienced in-house and freelance linguists, we conduct a QA round by XBench for 100% of our projects. For big projects or projects from key clients, we also include an internal LQA round by a third linguist. The cost of the spot QA check or the internal LQA round is absorbed by GTE Localize (not clients) to bring clients with the best quality translations.

We also improve our service quality by providing frequent evaluation and training for linguist teams as well as operation teams (sales, project managers, and vendor managers).

Deadline Compliance
We built a system for our team to efficiently track and follow deadlines for all projects. On this system dashboard, 2 hours before the deadline, the projects’ color turns yellow to remind our team of the upcoming deadlines. Projects delivered on time or ahead of the deadline are in green. Those delivered late are in red.

The system also automatically generates the KPI, and we monitor to make sure less than 2% of projects are late. In fact, the data is normally around 1%.

Price Strategy
GTE Localize’s price strategy is not to provide clients with the cheapest rates in the market. Instead, we offer value-for-money services to ensure that you receive the best value for every dollar you spend on us.

To make it a reality, we do not outsource any jobs to other agencies but only work with freelance translators or in-house translators. The costs for sales and marketing are minimized while the existing client’s return rate and growth by the high production quality are maximized. We also take advantage of technology to cut costs for clients.

GTE Localize offers translation and localization services for a wide range of industries, including life science, business, legal, engineering, manufacturing, IT & software, education, etc. For localization services, normally clients will have a frequent vendor and turn to them whenever a localization project arises. That’s also our case.

We are proud that 80% of our clients come back to us after our initial contract has been completed.

I’m sharing here in the order from the most frequent to the least: 
Translation Services – for Asian, European, and South American languages.
Localization Services – for website, app, software, game, book, marketing, e-learning, technical, etc.
Media Localization Services – Transcription, Closed Captioning, Subtitling, Voice-over, and Dubbing.
Interpretation Services - Simultaneous Interpretation, Consecutive Interpretation, Remote Interpretation, and Escort Interpretation.
Data Collection and Annotation Services

Since the services we provide are quite repetitive, we don’t take satisfaction surveys too regularly. The service frequency may vary a lot due to the client's demands. Some clients have weekly or even daily requests. Many clients only order a few jobs per year. A rough estimation is that as long as they’re coming back to us, that means they’re satisfied with our support. Even better, we got recommendations from our clients from time to time. It can be both internal referrals, like one department or country office introduces us to the other branch. It also can be external referrals, like a client recommends us to another company. Or sometimes a contact person on the client-side changes her job, moves to another company and comes back to us as a new client.

Our teams of dedicated salespeople and project managers (PMs) are available to support clients with all queries and issues relating to prices, deadlines, process, linguistic and technical aspects of a project. For example, if clients have questions or additional requests regarding the translations, our PMs act as an intermediate to forward information to the assigned translators and find the best solutions for clients.

We provide quotations for clients based on the actual number of words or pages that need translating. If the work volume is hard to measure by words or pages, we charge per working hour. Sometimes, it’s a package including several services with different price units. For example, when you need to localize your website into a new language, we would charge per word for translating the text contents and charge per word to test if the final layout in the new language is all fine from the view of the web visitors. There’re certain metrics to calculate the price of our services, like what you can find from here. But to have the precise and official quotation, we recommend you to contact our Localization Consultant team.

GTE Localize is open to all clients. There is no minimum budget required for a project. Whether clients have a few hundred words or hundreds of thousands of words, our team still treats the project with the utmost attention. The smallest bill is just somewhere around USD 15. If smaller volume, we even support the clients without charge (because it’s more costly to bill like $5 than waiving it). Our biggest bill as of now is about $300,000 for a project.

Our rates range from $0.04 to $0.15 per word, depending on the language pairs, services, and areas of specialization.

GTE Localize is a quite fast-growing company with an average growth of 100% per year, during the last 4 years. We have been evolving every week. So honestly speaking, it’s hard to say where we will be in the next 10 years. However, I do foresee some directions for our future:

1.    Catching up with the market in terms of technology;
2.    Expanding geographically to Europe and the U.S.;
3.    Expanding vertically to more client industries. If we’re already in the industry, go deeper.