On the Journey to Universal Understanding: Say Hello to the New Unbabel

september 30, 2021

Unbabel has always been ambitious. Unbabel was founded on the belief that if we brought together the latest cutting-edge technology and the passion and heart of a diverse network of humans, we could create universal understanding. We’re still driven by our incredible goal of becoming the world’s translation layer.

The pandemic has drastically changed the way consumers behave, customers buy, and enterprises operate. Years of digital transformation and technology adoption have been accelerated and compressed into a few short months. 

And at Unbabel, we were also at the cusp of something game-changing in 2020 — something that would elevate the way global businesses communicated. With the seismic shifts in the market and the explosion of global ecommerce, it was never more critical for businesses to harness the growth-driving potential of language. As brands rapidly expanded, they needed to truly connect with their customers around the world and their distributed workforce. This has become a strategic priority during the pandemic, with 62% of business decision-makers saying their translation and localization budget went up, and remains crucial, with 59% of them saying that they’ll continue to increase their efforts. It was time for everyone to see what we at Unbabel have always recognized since our inception. 

Buried in all these changes was a massive opportunity. We launched the new market category — Language operations (LangOps) — in juli 2021. It’s a testament to our growth and maturity as a brand and product. We’re one step closer to our lofty aim and ready to usher in the new era of localization. To offer intensely local and personalized customer experiences, global brands needed to unify their language strategy across the organization. And Unbabel will be the connecting force. 

Now that we’re disrupting the industry with an enormous AI-powered upgrade to translation, our brand needs to evolve to honestly reflect how far we’ve come and where we’re going next. To support this ever-changing landscape, while balancing the present market and the future state of the company, we need a dynamic and flexible brand platform. 

A more fluid and connected Unbabel

When you think of rebranding, the first thing that usually comes to mind is a new logo, color palettes, or font types. But for us, rebranding was more about how we evolve our brand to match our authentic voice.

A brand is how a product, company, or individual is perceived by those who experience it. Much more than just a logo, a brand is the feeling our voice and behaviors evoke.

Our value comes from the harmonious interaction between AI and humans. Our new branding aims to show the advantages and simplicity of the Unbabel platform with bold elements and fluid lines, or strings. The connected elements mark movement and flexibility — just like Unbabel connects you with your customers authentically, brings translation as a seamless presence into all your interactions, and keeps moving the needle. 

Transparency, flexibility, and reliability have always been the pillars of our product and identity. To reflect these core values better, we’ve evolved our brand expression with lighter, more relatable, and practical visual elements. 

Unbabel customers, partners, and stakeholders can trust Unbabel to make translation effortless, help them pivot during these uncertain times, and keep their customers and workforce connected. Our vision has remained the same, but the difference is that now we have more clarity on how to accomplish our goals: LangOps is the foundation upon which we’ll continue to build to empower localization teams around the globe. As our product roadmap unfolds, new features and capabilities will keep us moving toward becoming the world’s translation layer.

Transcending borders and limits: our promise

As always, customer service leaders can continue to rely on us. We’ll empower support teams around the world to delight their customers in any language. 

But language doesn’t only transcend borders; it transcends across the entire enterprise. Delivering a great customer experience doesn’t start and end with customer service. Brands must embed a customer-centric mindset in every function, from marketing to product and human resources to sales. The new Unbabel is all-encompassing, enabling brands to engage, transact and communicate globally. 

Unbabel is not just a translation solution. We’re a company that solves the translation problem to enable companies to operate and grow successfully worldwide. Unbabel is not your traditional language service provider — we’re taking an AI-first approach to removing language barriers so that companies can run better, faster and cost-effectively anywhere in the world.

What’s next for Unbabel

The branding is only one part of the message we’re trying to convey: We have a different approach to enabling native-language communication possible for every organization. Unbabel wants every business, regardless of the size or location, to be multinational. This new branding is defined to better reflect our core values and how we plan to deliver on our vision and brand promise. We’re still in the early stages of building Language Operations as the new paradigm, and we want everyone to be as excited as we are for what’s to come.

We’re activating our new branding and visualizing the new market category of LangOps with surprising, exciting, and impactful imagery. An acronym, just like a turn of phrase, an expression, or even an emoji, can mean different things to different people. We play on this idea to celebrate how language adds meaning to your communication as well as your strategy — and to illustrate that translation is a crucial building block in the foundation of your growing global business. 

Next up, we have our annual two-day summit LangOps Universe on oktober 27 and 28, where you can experience our new brand come to life. We’re also looking forward to taking our brand beyond digital and meeting our global audience where they are through in-person events and more. This branding and the event are only the first steps toward building a global LangOps community. We can’t wait for you to join us!

About the Author

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Content Team

Unbabel’s Content Team is responsible for showcasing Unbabel’s continuous growth and incredible pool of in-house experts. It delivers Unbabel’s unique brand across channels and produces accessible, compelling content on translation, localization, language, tech, CS, marketing, and more.

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