The Future of Multi-Lingual & Translation – with Paul McManus of XTENSOS

In this week’s episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, Derek speaks with Paul McManus, the founder, owner, and CEO of XTENSOS. 

They discuss his experience in the field of translation and multilingual services, as well as how new technologies can be utilized to drive the industry forward. 

XTENSOS

Paul starts by introducing his company, XTENSOS. 

“XTENSOS as a company, we essentially do four things. We have a consulting business. We have a learning and development business. We have an outsourcing business. And we also have an AI language services business.” 

XTENSOS is quite expansive, offering its outsourcing services primarily in Central and Eastern Europe, while its multilingual solutions cover most of Europe, North America, and Asia. 

“When I set up XTENSOS, the consulting piece was around how to build a business, how to grow it, how to develop more sales, how to manage people better, how to develop leadership teams.” 

Paul recounts how he began his career as a quality manager in manufacturing before the industry largely disappeared from Europe in favor of other countries. 

“I knew I needed a different career…so I used the quality manager link to end up stepping across into the translation industry.”

He describes how his new role required him to enter other aspects of business services. 

“So essentially anything in business that would help the global economy. So information security, HR, quality training, people development, supply chain, anything that was kind of a little bit outside sales or operations. 

And so I built a very small core team and I managed all those portfolio services, which kind of gave me the idea originally for XTENSOS being a portfolio business.” 

Paul describes the following theme as the single thread running through the company. 

“Essentially what we wanted to try and do as a theme was [to] help companies reduce costs, become more efficient, engage their people, and grow their business.

And so if you take that concept, our outsourcing operation allows people to reduce their costs.”    

Capitalizing on multilingual talent

Paul says XTENSOS takes a more relaxed form of partnership when it comes to clients. 

“We don’t try to hard-sell. What we try to do is if we’re going to build a relationship with a customer, we want it to be built on trust, credibility, and value.”  

He doesn’t try to overreach, recognizing that quality is what helps the business in the long term. 

“I wanted to be very selective about where we would take our opportunities from. And I would look to target companies that I think I can convince of the value proposition that I had, which is more than just an outsourced business. 

It’s an outsourced multilingual business.” 

Detailing XTENSOS’s translation expertise, Paul recalls finding multilingual talent in their Romanian back office.

“The thing that surprised me was how multilingual people are. Most people spoke five, six languages.”

He was able to spin this into his outsourcing operations. 

“One of the upsides of having a translation company is a lot of our customers also want to interact with the world in multiple languages.”

He explains that it helps reach out to customers better. 

“There’s a lot of data that [supports] that people will buy more based on transactions in their own language. I’m more likely to engage with it if it’s my own language, right?

And so what I found is that if you can provide the native language in that type of customer service role, it really enhances the engagement.” 

AI integration in the translation industry 

Paul is enthusiastic about opening their processes for further AI integration. Currently, machine translation technology is already part of their work.

“We’re also now looking at extending the AI into generating the content in the first place, being able to add voice, video, [turn] the whole static flat content into interactive content.” 

However, he’s savvy on the current limitations of the technology. 

“I always just caution a little bit–right now there’s far too much hype on the AI. 

We’re investing in a couple of products, but we’re very careful about how we do it.” 

He approaches new AI products with the aim of seeing how they can provide value.

“The real trick is to find [a model] that really adds value for a customer, something that helps them and replaces cost for them. 

So we’re trying to take a human view on AI as well to layer on top of our outsourcing business.” 

If you’re interested in learning more, you can connect with XTENSOS through their website here.