Multilingual Connections

As a global company with a presence in almost 200 countries, Airbnb’s product needs to be intuitive for different cultures and highly localized for each language. User research, however, focused primarily on the English-speaking members of the Airbnb community, as the little multilingual research that had been done was very time intensive.  This created a gap given the highly diverse Airbnb community – a gap the Airbnb Research team was committed to closing.

In 2017, Airbnb launched the International Community Panels (IC Panels), a six-month research project involving participants in nine non-English speaking countries with week-long cycles across the months. Though they had an internal localization team, the team’s top priority was localizing content for the Airbnb product and marketing materials. The IC Panels required incredible speed in order to incorporate feedback into the rapid product development cycles, so this was far outside what the localization team could handle.

And that’s where Multilingual Connections came in.

With just one week per research cycle – nine languages, over ten thousands words each, and up to 35 linguists ready to go Friday evening for a Sunday delivery – this project required a partnership that emphasized communication, clarity of workflow and a high degree of speed and accuracy.

“The only way to ensure dependable, fast, quality translations was working directly with a nimble translation company that could flex with my needs and that would see my translations as a top priority,” noted Wyatt Hayman, Airbnb Research Program Manager. “Multilingual Connections was fully willing and able to create new processes and adapt existing ones to meet the challenge of the IC Panels program.”