🇫🇷🎙️How To: Multilingual Storytelling with Studio Ochenta's Lory Martinez🎙️🇫🇷

Eurowaves #9 Interview

Lory is an international communications professional with over 12 years of experience crafting impactful strategies that resonate across diverse markets. As the CEO of a multilingual agency, she’s led award-winning campaigns in 27+ languages, managed global rebranding initiatives, and built strategies that connect brands to audiences worldwide. Fluent in English, French, and Spanish, Lory specializes in localization, brand storytelling, and cross-functional collaboration. Her passion lies in helping organizations amplify their message and foster authentic connections on a global scale. She is based in Paris, France.

You can find Lory on LinkedIn here.

How did you first get into podcasting, and what motivated you to start Studio Ochenta?

I was a radio journalist at a small public radio station in the States before deciding to move abroad to pursue a master’s degree in communications. When I arrived in France in 2015, podcasting was just starting to become popular, so I quickly networked and joined the local podcasting community as a freelance producer, doing what I was trained to do in radio: recording good stories.

The transition to podcasting was easy, but starting my own business was a challenge. I knew I wanted to take on more ambitious projects, but I was afraid to take the leap from freelance to small business. I was ultimately inspired to start Ochenta after attending the HEARSAY Audio Festival, a European festival celebrating audio art in Cork, Ireland. At the festival, I heard some incredible producers sharing the same fear: they too weren’t sure if they should put their stories out there. When I got home, I was motivated to get started, and finally put pen to paper to create our now-flagship show: Mija Podcast.

What are the primary challenges you’ve encountered in creating multilingual podcasts for diverse European audiences, and how have you addressed them?

The primary challenge is audience targeting. It’s important to understand that making a project in a new language isn’t enough to properly reach that audience. You really have to understand the local listener’s habits and what other shows might already be in their queue.

Audience targeting was a big challenge for our multilingual shows, but we ultimately solved it by treating each version as a new podcast in the local language (not just a translation) with a clear local listener in mind.

In your experience, how does Europe’s linguistic diversity impact content distribution and audience engagement in the podcasting industry?

It’s a very scattered landscape because, despite being multilingual, few people listen to content in languages other than their own. That being said, localized content on platforms like Netflix and the ubiquity of subtitled content on TikTok have created an interesting trend in media consumption, where people are accessing stories from around the world much more easily.

This accessibility has made it simpler to distribute multilingual content to multiple country targets at once.

How do you foresee the future of multilingual podcasting evolving in Europe?

I believe that more multilingual experiments will be publicly funded through partnerships with traditional media organizations. Projects like WePod, or even Ochenta’s latest production for Swiss Info, Lost Cells (available in English, French, and Spanish), show that there’s an opportunity for richer storytelling that takes advantage of our proximity to each other in Europe.

What are your thoughts on AI used for translation?

Honestly, it’s becoming more and more ubiquitous, though it still has its flaws. I’m seeing a lot of translators highlighting the importance of recognizing that localization is actually transcreation—that is, recreating content for a new audience with different cultural contexts.

It’s essential to have human oversight to ensure localizations are well done, and that’s something we make sure to do on every production we localize at Ochenta. That said, the tech is advancing very quickly, so I hope its use remains human-supported for the foreseeable future—so millions of translators don’t lose their jobs. But only time will tell.

Share your recommendations of 2–3 multilingual podcasts you love!
Sea of Rage, a multilingual production by WePod that recently won a Premios Ondas! Lost Cells from Swiss Info, of course!