When I first started searching for internships, I was under the delusion that getting one would be as simple as applying. Based on the statistics, pretty much everyone in the Translation and Localization Management course should have gotten an internship, or so I thought. My peers started getting interview after interview, yet after a dozen plus applications, I hadn’t gotten the offer for an interview even once. “What’s wrong with me?” I thought quite often. “Why am I not good enough?” Summer was not even a month away, and I hadn’t found anything. I was a failure.
I talked to my friend, a MIIS alumni I had met several years prior while I was doing the JET Program, about my struggles with finding an internship. The thread of hope she brought was a true saving grace for my mental health and my future in the field: she offered me the chance to connect with the boss of her first internship, David of LAI Translation Technology Services. When I connected with David, he wasn’t offering any internships. Not because he wasn’t open to it, but because he didn’t have the time. He was surprised that I was reaching out, but to my surprise and delight, as we talked, I found that he was open to hiring me as an intern. And after a pleasant interview, he hired me for the summer as a project management intern, then later extended the working period for the duration of my final school year.
Working as a Project Management Intern
When my friend worked for David, she worked as a games localization project management intern – something that I would like to do in my career as well. So when I found out that my job would be focused on translation technology more than games, I was disappointed at first. Thankfully, the content I began working on all pertained to the gaming industry in its own way – interviews with the creators, discussions of the technology behind the making of the games, and all sorts of little nuggets of information that I got to see simply by virtue of working. I found that the work was rewarding in its own way.
The first few weeks were a blur of insecurity and a feeling of ineptitude. Even after a year of taking classes at MIIS pertaining to working as a project manager, I found that my knowledge was extremely limited when starting out. Everything that David has me do has a detailed breakdown of the steps, and I find these exchanges to be vital to doing the work I have even now, 6 months since starting this job.
We work with MemoQ, but not the new one. Instead, we use the rather dated MemoQ 6.2. David explained to me that because MemoQ does not have backwards compatibility, a lot of the data and files that he’s put into it would be rendered unusable upon using a more updated version of MemoQ. Additionally, once a newer version of MemoQ is installed, even when uninstalled, older versions of MemoQ no longer work. Even the most up-to-date and sophisticated CAT tools used in the field still have their issues, it seems.
Minimum Wage
Bosses and companies love to hide wages. The common reason is to keep peace in the office, because if one worker gets more money than another, it can cause conflict within the workforce. However, I disagree with this sentiment. Our ire is misdirected against one another when it should be directed at our bosses. We are not legally obligated to hide our wages. Rather, by discussing our wages, we are better equipped to argue our cases when talking about how much we SHOULD be getting for our work. No graduate student should be getting minimum wage.
Which brings me to my second point of envy – learning about my peer’s wages, because I am getting minimum wage. As a worker, this fills me with a myriad of emotions, most not positive. However, I must recall and remember that I was desperate for work, that I am gaining experience, and that everything can lead to better things in the future. I must also remember the positives of my job. Yes, my boss pays me minimum wage, but I am a remote worker with extremely flexible hours. My boss is understanding of my position as a student and allows me time whenever I need to do things for school. The work is not hair-pulling in difficulty. Above all else, having a little bit of income is better than no income at all.
A Breakdown of the Things I Did
Immediately upon starting, David got to work with giving me jobs that would teach me and also benefit his company. He started very simple: creation of a consolidated termbase. The reasoning was simple: each translator has their own quirks, and with those quirks comes a number of words that they persistently write incorrectly. This is particularly obvious in a language with three different alphabets, like Japanese, as the nuance behind writing a word in a specific alphabet is a necessary consideration when translation. Thus, a creation of a consolidated termbase – particularly one that contains the specific style for each word – would allow these translators a quick place to check their choices. This job was a great example of why good terminology management is crucial.
The second thing David started having me work on was vendor management related. David wanted me to head the search for new blood within the company. In particular, he was seeking freelance translators. And so he passed the responsibility onto me. This particular task has continued even to today.
Seeking out freelance translators can be broken into two methods: cold-calling and job boards. I started with cold-calling. I drafted a number of attention-grabbing email headers like, “are you interested in working for ____” and then created a short, informational message that could be sent to a variety of platforms. I sent this message to several hundred people. As you might suspect, out of every 20 messages sent, I might have gotten one response. And of those few dozen responses, only one ended up becoming a translator for the company.
Some of my predecessor interns had done some preliminary research pertaining to this work: they’d looked at job boards and compiled some information about the pros and cons to the ones they’d found – but other than that, this was a true test of my ability to create plans. I started by doing new research on the different job boards available and compiling my own information: what do they allow us to do, how much do they cost, what kinds of people do they focus on. There was a lot less information than I would have preferred, but there was still enough to make some good decisions about which ones to use. The worst ones were the boards that advertised as being free to use but then charged for each successful applicant or for any applicant we did not refuse within a rather short timeframe. For example, Indeed.
Taking these factors into consideration, I reduced the job boards to three per language (Japanese and English) and wrote a brief report about the pros and cons of the six total boards I’d found. My boss was quite excited to post to any of these boards. And so, the next step began: drafting the job posting. This one was rather quick overall, and within a week we had a job post that we were ready to put online.
After, any translators we’d successfully vetted were placed under my direct command. With David’s instructions, I was to prepare the projects we had for each translator, receive and prepare their translations for the following steps of quality checking and file preparation, and finally, handle their invoicing.
The last task that David has me do is quality assurance. This is the most tedious and simultaneously most relaxing work I do. One file may take me between five to eight hours to do in a rather repetitive flow of combing through each line. This can get boring quickly. However, there is something relaxing about the work that I find myself appreciating. I like to get a nice refreshment, turn on some relaxing music, and comb through each line diligently. The repetitive nature of it means that mistakes are infrequent and not critical, which makes it a great activity for someone like me, who hates to get in trouble.
When I first started doing quality assurance, I was extremely slow and I asked questions about all sorts of lines. It took me nearly double the amount of time to check things as it does now. If that’s not a perfect example of growth, I don’t know what is. Something I noted is that while quality assurance people aren’t paid much and the job is rather repetitive – a decent grasp of the language being checked is necessary, which makes me question if it shouldn’t be paid a little better.
Struggles and Lessons Learned
I had a number of things I struggled with. Sometimes there was nothing to do and I was just sitting around twiddling my thumbs. I felt conflicted about what to do about time tracking in this situation. Do I still clock in and wait around for something to do? Or do I not clock the hours that I am not working? I knew people who did both. However, in the end, I decided it was better to just clock out when I didn’t have work to do.
Other times I worried that I was spending too little time focusing on a specific task and that I was using too much of my work time on myself. For example, when I got up to get a drink or when I went to the bathroom, I felt bad for not clocking out. But I realized that in a classic office, conversations, getting drinks, and going to the bathroom were all done on the clock. It’s okay to have time where you’re unfocused on the job, I realized. And so I had to let go of the stress of not counting every second that I did something else.
Another struggle I had was getting any sort of criticism. My boss is very kind and always phrases his emails in very nice ways. It still didn’t change how I felt whenever I did something wrong and had to correct things. I often spent a few nights thinking about how I could have done better and how I could have avoided that mistake. Through this job, I learned that mistakes are not normally the end of the world, and as a fresh hire, I need to forgive myself when I do make mistakes.
All in all, I feel like this experience has been wonderful for my growth, both personally and professionally.