by: Benjamin Mendelsohn
Benjamin Mendelsohn (TLM ’24) details his practicum experience working on LocReady, a digital resource for Localization students.
In the fall semester of 2023, I worked with my two teammates, Maddy and Lindsay, on managing LocReady as part of my practicum project. LocReady is an organization dedicated to improving career readiness and helping people make professional connections within the Localization industry.
There were two parts to my experience: one collaborative and one independent. The collaboration involved close communication with my teammates to plan the direction of LocReady, set our goals for the company, and coordinate video uploads to our website. The other was my personal responsibility of scheduling, recording, editing, and uploading interviews with subjects. This involved contacting graduates and friends in the localization industry and tailoring each interview to focus on their specific experiences. The process of finding interviewees was more difficult than expected, as subjects would frequently cancel with extremely short notice. Most of the time this was due to time zone difficulties or schedule mismatches, but in one case, the subject’s wife went into labor a few hours before the interview and obviously they were not available afterwards.
My best work was my interview with Linka Wade, a former classmate both at MIIS and in our undergraduate program. We discussed her time as a project manager at Supertext and the state of the company before a sweeping layoff cut through the company and left her unemployed. I had wanted her as an interview subject from the beginning of the project because I wanted a rawer look at the state of the industry without any rose-tinted glasses. Linka had, within only a few months of working there, made herself a managerial pillar of the company, being involved at various levels in almost every project the company had at once. Despite that, when layoffs came, she was seen as a junior employee, and cut. Linka had nothing bad to say about Supertext. In fact, she seemed grateful for the opportunity and reminisced fondly about working with the people there. She also mentioned something that stuck out to me, which was that the training she had received at MIIS had proved absolutely essential for the job. In particular, she noted that her terminology training had been extremely helpful, and that since she had been in the company while still taking classes, she was essentially doing the same things for classwork at the same time as doing them in her job.
Ultimately, I feel that the insights I gained during this experience were more unfiltered than what I had learned in my classes alone. It was interesting to speak with real people one on one about their experiences in a difficult industry which is often divorced from the theory and best practices that we are taught. However, this is not to say that it was completely sobering, or doom-and-gloom. Nobody was giving up on localization. People liked what they did. It reminded me that despite an avalanche of difficulties, language work is still worth doing.