Today we are going to have a conversation with Kenzie Slottow, Product Development Manager and Design Researcher at Amara!

What do you do for Amara as the Product Development Manager and Design Researcher? 

As product development manager, the most concise way to say is that I focus on product strategy. So the questions that I answer are what are Amara trying to accomplish, what do we build to accomplish those goals? How do we build it? And when do we build it?

I answer all those questions by talking to various people inside and outside of the organization and then make sure that the answers are clear to everyone who might care from internal resources to clients, potential users, etc.

The design part is my favorite though, and that is talking to users to observe what they do and figuring out what their problems are and how we can solve them.

And then you figure out what is the right level of detail and understanding to give to design and engineering teams. Then close the loop after they build something and while they’re building to make sure that it’s actually what the users do need, and if it’s not, make some adjustments and do it all over again.

What do you think is the biggest challenge in this position? Is the internal communicating part or the researching of design part?

What do you think is the biggest challenge in this position? Is the internal communicating part or the researching of design part?

I wouldn’t say that it’s either in particular, it’s more like choosing one at a time. So I’m swimming in two lanes so I have to choose one to focus on at a time and that’s really hard for me.

I’m the kind of person who likes to really do as much as possible, as fast as possible and it doesn’t work like that because I would just run myself into the ground.

So last year I’ve gotten the hang of it mostly. So right now, for example, I’m focusing on building out the design process with the design team and trying not to get too involved in other parts of the organization at the moment. But that’s definitely the biggest challenge that doing one thing at a time or focusing in one of those areas at a time.

So why did you decide to work at Amara in the first place?

I was looking for a job in design research, and two years ago, I had recently discovered the field of design thinking or industrial design. As I was starting to dive into it, I was just feeling so passionately that I wanted to understand people’s problems and help solve them in a really lasting way. Not like a, you know, here’s a temporary solution, but here’s a solution that is so well thought out that it will last you a very long time.

There are a lot of other resources available online that I was using and taking some courses with Coursera. And during that time Amara needed someone to solve problems and build processes for the engineering team. So I just jumped on board.

In addition to working for Amara, we know you are also an artist and entrepreneur, could you talk a little bit about these two aspects of you?

I play and compose music for flute for a variety of projects. So my entrepreneur side right now is really musically driven and that is bringing together and presenting those musical projects.

They’re all on kenzieslottow.com. For a very brief synopsis of what I’m doing at the moment, I’m looking at how people can understand each other better and more specifically how to be a good ally to people whose experiences I don’t share.

My most recent project was a collaboration with a spoken word artist here in Austin. He’s a slam poet, and he wrote a poem about the power of creativity to help a black people in the ghetto surmount the discrimination that they experience, and I was tasked with creating something out of that. I’m not black, and I’ve never lived in the ghetto, so it was a very interesting project and I look forward to collaborating with him more.

That’s the most recent one, and I’m sure I’ll expand to other stuff as an entrepreneur probably in a few years.

Do you feel any kind of content that is produced in Spanish, but you think is worth to be translated into other languages to share with people speak other languages?

I can only answer that question in the sense of things that I’ve recently watched or enjoyed that I translated for my friends because I don’t presume to judge the quality of Spanish contents in the world because it’s spoken in tons of places.

So some recent things that I’ve watched that I, that I want to share with my friends where I’m this telenovela, it’s a Mexican one, and it’s kinda old, but I’m really into a, like renaissance stairs and pirates and a medieval fiction and stuff.

So it’s called Corazón Salvaje and it’s like a pirate adventure thing in Mexico. And then there’s, I love standup comedy and it’s fun to translate that because there are so many cultural references. So you, by listening to Spanish stand up comedy I under, I learned a lot about the culture of where that specific comic is from and you know, pop culture.

And then another thing that I subtitled recently for a friend, is a song by Bebe who is from Spain, and the song is called Ella. It’s a really positive message for women who have experienced sexual assault and domestic violence and it’s just this beautiful message with they’re a really awesome music video. So those are the recent things that I can think of.

Why do you think translations are important to the world we live in?

I think translation is important in our world because if we don’t translate contents, the attitudes and cultures of the most popular language or languages will take over. And I don’t want the astounding richness of culture and perspectives in this world to be diminished.

What do you think is the future of translation?

The first thing that comes to my mind is what the future will look like if we successfully translate tons of content, tons of languages, and I think that will look like more kindness, more understanding, more compassionate and more open-mindedness, which is why I want to do it and be a part of it.

The other thing that came to mind was a artificial intelligence. Because translation jobs are changing and many see that as a threat that artificial and machine learning can take over a big part of what human translators are doing now.

But I see it as a really great opportunity and not as a threat because if we embrace machine learning as a way to do a literal first pass at translation, then humans, experts at language are left to focus on the art and the intricacy of translation instead of the basics that they’re spending so much of their time manually doing now.

And so translations will be a lot higher quality in last time and then humans can be compensated for the work that only they can do.

Do you ever get into a situation or social event that is not speaking your native language and do something inappropriate or something embarrassing?

I’m sure that I have. Actually, one really embarrassing thing that I did in Spanish context was actually teaching an English class to Spanish speakers. Because I told you that pronunciation is very tricky. So I was teaching a lesson which included the pronunciation.

While I was teaching a word “countryside”, people were pronouncing that word countryside because that’s what it looked like and without realizing what the different pieces of the word would sound like if I broke it up for them.

I pointed to each section of the word instead of by itself, which if you say just the first syllable of countryside repeatedly and with an emphasis, it starts to not work out very well. So I had some other professors and training English teachers in training in the back of the room watching me and they just started snickering to themselves and laughing because I was standing at the front of the room repeating over and over the first syllable of “countryside” with everybody in the class.

About Meet the Amararians series

We want to put a face to Amara by creating stories and interviewing our community members. This is an ongoing project, that introduces our internal staff, volunteers, and other community members who contribute to Amara and the captioning/translating community.

If you know an Amararian who has an interesting story, let us know!