Four incredible women in localization and I began the Localization HS Outreach project in September of 2022, with the goal of introducing the localization industry to high schoolers and to show them the plethora of ways they could get involved in localization based on their varied interests and skills. Read here the different perspectives of each team member regarding the project: Linh Nguyen, Brooke Story, Cecilia Lin, and Silu (Rita) Zhang.
Mission
Evangelize the localization industry to high school students in Santa Clara and Monterey counties with the hope of sparking interest and guiding students towards an educational and professional path towards localization.
Objectives
•Visit at least three high schools and present on the localization industry by May 2023.
•Give engaging and interactive presentations to students on localization which include examples of content teenagers are familiar with (i.e. anime, movies, TV shows, video games).
•Collect feedback from students through a post-presentation survey about their thoughts on the presentation and interest in the localization industry.
Rallying Towards a Vision
Because of my background in education and in high school mentoring, I was excited about the idea to teach high school students what localization is and all the different ways they could start forging a path for themselves in the industry even now. I have seen many college and career outreach presentations for high schoolers, having coordinated a number of them myself at my previous job. I reached out to classmates to gauge others’ interest in joining my efforts in this outreach, and was happy to find that others were excited about this endeavor as well! The general sentiment among our group was that we would have all loved to have heard about localization back in high school, when we knew we had a passion for languages but had no idea what types of career opportunities (other than teaching) were available to us. We all agreed that if we would have known about localization sooner, we would have made different decisions in our undergraduate studies and beyond to have forged a different path!
As the team was forming, we quickly decided to cap the number of members we’d have to ensure we would have optimal productivity. Especially as the person who brought everyone together, I didn’t want to end up having team members sitting around without anything to do! We also all shared what our clear weekly commitment was to this project to be realistic about the goals we could set each week and tasks we would share. My role very naturally evolved to that of project manager, as I was the one who began scheduling our meetings and creating our first agendas, process documents, and task planner. We settled on a day and time we could meet weekly.
One of our team members, Linh, found this blog post early on which chronicles Meg Murphy’s (ATA) journey creating a presentation about localization and its career opportunities to high school students in the US. Murphy’s post inspired us to talk through examples of engaging localization examples to use in our presentation so as to keep it not only engaging but even enticing for students, as they hopefully see content they are personally excited about.
Building Outreach
Two parallel tasks became priorities right away: choosing the schools to contact and designing our outreach materials; most urgently, a one-page information sheet on what localization is and why high schoolers would be interested! We subsequently created two teams within our (then) six members for these tasks, one team that would research high schools in the area and list their contact information, and another team that would design the outreach materials.
Our team member Rita did a fantastic job on school research, and even ranked schools by priority to contact based on their size, student ethnic backgrounds, and language programs offered. See an example of this ranking below.
I began tracking the schools which responded to us and scheduled visits in an Excel sheet tracker:
The assets we created are an informational one-pager given to the contact person(s) from a school upon initial outreach, a brochure on localization for students, a PowerPoint presentation, a quiz for students designed to show them careers that fit their interests and skills, and a post-presentation survey.
Each of these assets took at least three weeks to develop and finalize, after multiple iterations and meetings to review and discuss them.
We decided to localize the brochure for students into Spanish, which is by far the most-spoken non-English language amongst the high schoolers at the schools we’ve reached out to. A team member created the translation project on Phrase, I translated and QA-ed the translation, and the other team member performed DTP on the Spanish asset, circling back with me for one last review round before finalizing.
We are currently planning to localize the brochure into Vietnamese as well, as schools in San Jose have a high number of Vietnamese-speaking students. At our last visit, one student actually approached us and asked if we had a brochure in Vietnamese. Taking resources like this home and showing one’s parents in their native language can be a very powerful experience for the student and the family! Since we will do at least two more school visits in San Jose (and hopefully more!), we’d like to offer this resource to the Vietnamese speakers there.
Like Meg Murphy outlines in her blog post, we wanted to collect feedback from the students, not only so that we could continuously improve our presentation materials and strategy, but so that we also had data about how many of these students were hearing about localization for the first time, and how many are very interested in going into the field after hearing from us about it!
First Visit
After much planning and practicing, we finally had our first school visit on December 7, 2022 at Oak Grove High School in San Jose, CA! We had a low turnout, 4 students and 2 staff members, but the students who attended were interested and engaged in the presentation!
We received very positive feedback from the students who attended the presentation, including:
In addition, the school invited us back for a second visit, this time to present in front of two Spanish classes! We are adjusting our outreach strategy slightly for the spring to contact the language department head of a high school specifically, since we would likely reach more students if our presentation were given to a class already full of language students.
We have four upcoming school visits in the spring, and are already learning from our first visit and post-mortem meeting about what we can do to make the experience even better for students. We are excited to continue to spread the word about localization and its opportunities to many more high schoolers!
References
Murphy, Meg M. “Reaching the Future of Localization.” ATA TCD, 25 March 2020, http://ata-tcd.com/reaching-the-future-of-localization/. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.