A Passion for Localisation

Some time ago, I had a situation when I arrived home from work. Around this time, the teams in Corel had performed multiple sim-ships...with every new release they were stripping days off the release cycle....meeting each week in focus groups to develop numerous incremental process improvements, adding new features to the localisation tools, and maintaining their flexibility as the US teams shifted their deadlines.

In other words, all the usual work that happens in most of our companies.

The sort of work we can be all proud of.

So here's the situation I'm faced with. I've just arrived home and my 6 year old daughter is waiting up me. She's a young lady on a mission.

"Daddy," she says, "just what is it you do all day?'.

"I work", I told her. "I know that. But what sort of work?"

"What do you mean?" I ask.

"Well," she says, "today in class we had to talk about our daddy's job. The teacher asked each of us what our daddies did."

"Fred's dad is a bus man. Guess what he does?"

."Drives Buses?"

"Correct. Susan's dad is a postman. Guess what he does ?"

"Delivers post?"

"Exactly. Peter's Dad is a Policeman. Guess what he does?"

"Catches robbers?"

"3 out of 3 daddy."

"Guess what happened when it came to my turn and told them you worked in local....local...localisation. DADDY, I spent five days practicing how to pronounce that word and nobody had a clue what it meant. Nobody. Not even my teacher......"

You know something? She's right. Outside of the localisation industry, nobody knows what we do. Think of the times you're drawn into conversation with a stranger as get you hair cut, sitting down on a plane or on a bus, and they ask what do you do?

How do you explain it to them?

The best reaction I've got so far is : oh, you mean you turn dollar signs into pound signs!

So, I think there's a need to raise the public's awareness of what localisation is all about.

Why?

First, it's in all our interests to maintain Ireland's position as the centre of the localisation universe.

Is this important?

Think back over the past few years: Frame has gone, Claris has gone. Recently some vendors relocated their engineering ops abroad. When does a drop become a river? When does a river become a flood?

Second, I think our professional profile within the software industry leaves something to be desired, and I'll talk about that in a few moments

Professional certification provides us with an opportunity to achieve those goals.

But it also gives each us the potential for competitive advantage: whether you're an individual who wants to progress in your career path, or an subsidiary trying to convince your American parent that you provide value.

Professional Certification provides a focus for raising your standards.

But perhaps you still remain unconvinced.

So let me tell you a few stories....

I've already shown you that localisation means very little to the public - at least to my daughter's class. Okay, so let's change our view and move the lens a few degrees.

About two weeks ago I was looking through the jobs page - as you do! - and I came across an advert which read:

Software Development House requires experienced testers for their development labs. Ideally people from a non-localisation background who want a fast moving career in testing and development.

Ideally people from a non-localisation background

I found that intriguing.

Why would a development company, desperate for testers, specifically exclude QA people with localisation experience. It made me curious, although I had my suspicions.

So I called them up and, to be honest, I was disappointed to have my suspicions confirmed.

They were a development house, they said. They told me they wanted testers who understood how software was put together. They wanted testers who could break the functionality of the product. To test software to destruction and beyond. They didn't want in their own words: "testers who only knew how to look at screens all day to see if they were laid out correctly".

Now I find that insulting to my people. Completely inaccurate. But that's one perception prevailing about our standards, or lack of them.

Then I noticed another advert. Here, the story was a little different. Its language and tone was breathtaking. Exciting almost. Opportunities in localisation it flashed in 8 point times Roman. All you need, it gasped, is FAS A, CATT, ECDL, . MCPs, Etc.

Etc.?

A writing teacher once told me never to use the word etc. at the end of a sentence because it simply meant you couldn't think of anything else to list.

So here we have an advert which says that you can get a job in this business if you have a certificate which falls under the classification of etc.?

But the first ad looking for testers also suggested something else. The company was getting lots of applications from testers in the localisation business.

It was offering a fast-moving career in testing and development. There was a vague suggestion that the localisation people they met felt there was no future or fast-track career in localisation testing! I tell you, from experience that's not the case.

A lot of my top team leads and managers came through the QA route.

So here we have another view of localisation - this time from within the professional software industry. That the job is simple, perhaps even superficial, with a vague hint that perhaps it doesn't challenge people.

That's certainly not my experience, nor yours I imagine.

Professional Certification provides us with an opportunity to change that perspective within the software industry.

Now let's look at another view. I've been in this business for seven years now. It's my third career and if I manage to hang in for another year, localisation will have the distinction of being my longest career to date.

To my family, I've obviously got a stable career - they just don't know what the hell it is.

Now maybe this is a sad indication of my social life, but it seems that most of my close friends come from the localisation business.

And every time we go for a drink we seem to have the same discussion. It starts out with all the usual stuff.

Movies, family, sport, cars .....but after about ten minutes...ten minutes... we find ourselves gradually talking about shipping dates, the terrible software handoffs we get from the US, the number of products we released that day, who we interviewed that day etc., etc., etc.!

Yes, we end talking about localisation.

It's like a scene from Groundhog Day. We cover the same ground, over and over again. The players and products may differ, but the script never changes.

And each quarter we end up with the same punch line to our plot: the fact that we seem to spend our time swapping each other's resources.

Imagine the conversation. Your friend confesses that he's just hired one of your testers. You tell him not to worry, you've just made an offer to one of his.

Then your other friend confesses she's just hired one of your people to be a team lead. She tries to soften the blow by saying that the person didn't see a career path in your company.

Now here's the funny bit: you confess you've just hired somebody from her company to be a lead in your organisation and they told you the very same thing: no career progression. So here we have the ultimate irony, my friend's organisation has a better opinion of one my people than I do, and vice versa.

Localisation is a small, small world.

So what has this got to do with Certification. Well, it's as if we have, in Ireland, this industrial-sized Balance Sheet of localisation resources.

Now in the finance world, balance sheets are supposed to balance. And each year, if you're doing the job right, the balance sheet should be showing increased value.

So, if we consider our human resources, our people, as our assets - as we should - have we as an industry increased the value on balance sheet of localisation?

Well it all depends on how you define value. Here's how I'd define it: I'd define it as the sum of localisation knowledge that exists in this country: what it is, how to do it, when to do it. ETC!

Yet the more people I interview, the more people I speak to in the industry, has led me to believe that perhaps the sum of localisation knowledge in the country hasn't changed much over the past four years.

Yes, more people have come into the business, but in my experience that knowledge has become diluted. Everybody knows a little bit, but the passion and drive to understand all aspects of localisation seems to have dwindled. It's as though people feel they can get by with a little bit of knowledge.

Let's take an example. Imagine you're interviewing somebody, already experienced in the localisation business, for quality assurance. Ask them for a five minute presentation on Code Pages, what they are and the sort of issues they might expect to find. On average, what do you think is likely to happen?

Or if you're interviewing an engineer who came into the business in the last three years, find out when was the last time they worked on source code. Or ask them how they'd write a small tool to extract text from a custom file format in your product.

Maybe, in these days of Windows and the Mac you think this is irrelevant? But just take a look at LINUX and you realise that we're back to square one. But forget about LINUX. Let's just focus on Windows. Why would you need engineers who can understand source code, if all they do each day is edit and resize DLLs.

Trick question that.

There is a view that technology has simplified the role of localisation engineers. True, it has, but it hasn't the removed the responsibility or the task of raising awareness among the US development teams or made that task any easier.

Now you might think, if you are in the business long enough, the work is already done with the parent. But people move on, companies get acquired and the cycle of knowledge management starts all over again.

I think our industry has been a victim of its own incremental improvements.

As tasks got simpler, and it became harder to recruit, we started lowering the entry barriers in localisation. And localisation knowledge became diluted.

Whether we are a publisher or a vendor, we still have a role to teach the US teams to write and structure their software so that we can localise it quickly and with a minimum of effort.

But where do we get that knowledge?

Certainly, as companies we have a responsibility to train and develop our people.

But often that is not enough. How can we guarantee consistency in what people know as they move through this industry?

Some people think localisation is a business of implementation. Resizing, bug-fixing, documentation production etc.

I disagree.

Localisation is really about the business of influencing.

As a Director of Localisation, I need to hire people who can influence the development of our Canadian software so it that it's localisation enabled.

How can they do that if they don't know what they are talking about.

That's why technical standards need to kept high.

Professional Certification helps provide a solution. It sets measurable, consistent standards which people have to meet.

In some professions certification/qualification/standards, however you want to call it, they can be seen as barriers to entry to the profession. And with good reason. Think of the legal profession, the field of finance, medicine.

But I'm not suggesting that we use Certification as a barrier to entry. Yes, it raises the bar in terms of what you need to call yourself a localisation professional. But I believe it also creates an opportunity to solve the recruitment & resourcing problem that persists in this industry. In other words, rather than being a barrier to entry, Professional Certification creates opportunities for entry. It opens the possibility of developing alternative resource streams.

Some time ago, a number of companies, such as Symantec and Corel worked with FAS to develop Localisation Quality Assurance Training courses. This created an opportunity to take some people who were unemployed and insert them into the work environment. This has worked reasonably well, but there are opportunities to go further.

There's a more ambitious program underway called FIT - the FastTrack to IT - which aims to take long-term unemployed and train them in various aspects of IT- from NT administrators to localisation professionals.

Professional Certification also has a role to play here as it suggests courses, training and of course consistency in building up our knowledge and skills base.

It creates an opportunity for us to bring people in from different backgrounds, different environments, rather than swapping our resources between companies.

So let's recap. Why do we need Professional Certification in this industry? Three reasons:

First, it's in all our interests to maintain Ireland's position as the centre of the localisation universe.

Second, we need to raise the public and professional profile of localisation and increase people's understanding of what its all about. We need to enhance our credibility.

Third, if each of us is to wants to gain some competitive advantage, whether its as an individual in progressing your career path, or as an organisation trying to convince your American parent that you provide value, then certification provides a focus for raising both your individual and your company's standards.

And for me.....well there's a fourth, more personal reason. You see...in three years time....my son will be in school, in that same class my daughter was in, perhaps even with the same teacher....and he's going to be asked that same question: "What does your Daddy do?"

And when he tells them, I want the class to things like "WOW! COOL! THAT'S RAPID, etc. etc. etc.

Thank you.