Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast

Sandra Elhelw was born in South Australia two months after her parents arrived from Egypt. At 10, September 11 forced her into a rapid education about her own religion and culture because suddenly everyone was asking questions, and not from a place of curiosity. Now the CEO of the Settlement Council of Australia, Sandra explains why the majority of migrants receive no formal settlement support, why we are not at risk of people failing to learn English but are at risk of losing cultural richness, and why the real question is not whether to have a multicultural society but how to make one work. She also shares how the Settlement Council worked with LEXIGO on a cancer screening project that reached over 300,000 people across migrant communities.This is Episode 35 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.For more episodes, visit lexigo.com

In Chinese culture, the basic smiley emoji means contempt. The waving emoji means go away. Carl Gene Fordham, newly elected National President of AUSIT and forensic translator working between English and Mandarin, explains why that matters in court. Forensic translation goes the opposite direction from localization: instead of transforming a text for a target audience, you must account for every possible meaning. Five Chinese words can be either a command or a prediction, and you cannot choose. Carl shares how he started learning Chinese at 10 because nobody told him it was hard, why interpreters get scapegoated in courtrooms, and what the next version of Australia's Code of Ethics will say about AI.This is Episode 34 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.

At five years old, Saad Khalid walked into a kindergarten in Virginia and introduced himself with As-Salaam-Alaikum. Everyone looked dazed and confused. A teaching assistant named Ms Asghari, married to a Pakistani, stepped in and taught him English on the sidelines. That one year shaped his entire direction. Now 22, a finalist for Young Australian of the Year, and the director of Australia's first Multicultural Youth Media Summit, Saad shares the story of the 2,000 Muslim camel drivers who opened up Outback Australia in the 1800s and were forgotten, why a generational change is putting young migrants at the front of multicultural storytelling, and why the word pioneer should not be reserved for settlers.This is Episode 33 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.

When HubSpot launched in Japan, Nataly Kelly swapped out the white American stock photos for Asian models. Her Japanese localization specialist called and said: these are not Japanese people. It was like putting Italians on a Norwegian website. Days before launch, she called Renato Beninatto, sourced a local photographer in Tokyo, and shot photos of actual HubSpot employees. Many are still on the site years later. Nataly, CMO at Zappi and former VP of Localization at HubSpot, shares why having a website in another language is where localization begins, not where it ends, how deep hyperlocal marketing really needs to go, and why the willingness to feel stupid is the one trait that makes localization people so capable across every domain.This is Episode 32 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.

If Shazam can identify a song in a noisy nightclub, then we can Shazam languages and connect someone who speaks that language in real time. That was the thought that led Dieter Runge to co-found Boostlingo, a language access platform born from four people sleeping under their desks in San Francisco. Dieter shares how Star Trek's universal translator became his life's work, why holoportation boxes are transforming sign language interpretation in Australia, and what it felt like to hear that someone handed a stranger an iPhone with his technology during a natural disaster so they could find the Red Cross shelter. He introduces his LARGE framework: Language Access, Rights, Justice, and Equity, and argues that AI will reverse language extinction rather than accelerate it.This is Episode 31 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.

Australia spends $400 million on language services over five years, but every agency procures them differently, with no standard approach to quality, complaints, or remuneration. Leigh Cox, Director of Language Services Policy at the Department of Home Affairs, explains how his team was set up to fix that. He shares the geospatial mapping exercise that revealed the strongest anti-Muslim correspondence came from towns with almost no diversity at all, the Kosovo refugee kids who sparked his passion through daily soccer tournaments in a small country town, and why transcreation, not word-for-word translation, is the shift that is finally gaining traction across Australian government.This is Episode 30 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.

Eddie Arrieta expected 80% of his global readers to say they wanted Multilingual Magazine translated into their native languages. Instead, across every continent, over 75% said keep it in English. The CEO of Multilingual Media, a publication distributed to 110 countries, explains why that result tells us something fundamental about how humans find common ground. He also shares the moment a Japanese client taught him that his Western sales pipeline was completely wrong, why AI can generate content but cannot create what he calls texture, and the remote work structure that keeps a team spread across Colombia, the US, Argentina, and Croatia aligned with 15-minute daily stand-ups and written daily updates.This is Episode 29 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.

At university, Mark Saba's international marketing classes called it ethnic, foreign, or multicultural marketing. He thought: you are entering a campaign already thinking of your market as foreign. That does not align with marketing's foundational principle of thinking about the audience first. Fifteen years later, he wrote the book. LEXIGO's CEO introduces Native Experience Marketing and the six-stage NATIVE framework for reaching audiences in their native languages and cultures. His strongest message: stop treating culturally diverse communities as one market. Ten communities in one room all have different struggles, views, and sentiments. Build campaigns for community, by community.This is Episode 28 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.

A poet wrote a novel in six months on one of the first desktop computers. His publisher took him out in a canoe and asked him never to submit it to anyone. The point: when you write poetry, you spend 100 minutes thinking for every word. Speed is the enemy of everything good about writing. Tim Brookes returns for Part 2 to argue that the digital revolution is built on the assumptions of the Latin alphabet, and every script that does not fit those assumptions is being left behind. He explains why scripts used for divination, ceremony, and magic are the hardest to digitise, what AI is doing to our relationship with the written word, and why his next project is helping the Kapampangan people in the Philippines bring their calligraphic script into the digital age without losing it.This is Episode 27 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.

Drop a file into a Dropbox folder. Fifteen seconds later, you have a machine-translated document with the glossary applied, the file renamed, and the word count added. Edwin Trebels returns for Part 2 to walk through the LangOps system his team built using Blackbird as a workflow orchestrator, saving 40 hours a week across their microservices. He explains why his team chose to build rather than buy, how a Slack emoji can trigger a translation workflow, and the quality estimation data showing that 27.3% of their DeepL output publishes untouched. His strongest message: people at large companies are experimenting in secret because they fear it will show up on their performance reviews. If you cannot experiment, you cannot improve.This is Episode 26 of Beyond Translation: The Native Experience Podcast, produced by LEXIGO.New episodes weekly. Visit lexigo.com for more.