Introduction

When I applied to the Middlebury Institute’s Translation and Localization Management track (TLM, for short), my sights were locked on to the T and L aspects of the degree, with little thought put into what the M side of things would entail. I knew that my future endeavors would require me to refine my language skills—a field that I knew the Middlebury pedigree already excelled in—while also picking up some informative technology savvy along the way. What I didn’t anticipate was how integral the management skills learned in my classes would prove to be to my efficiency as a localizer, and how well those skills would translate back to all other aspects of my education in time.

The first of my four semesters here at the Institute required me to take Alaina Brantner’s Localization Project Management (LPM) course. I was initially hesitant about the class, since “management” as a subject matter had always sounded so clinical to me. I wondered if the class would be a long but necessary slog through dry business terminology and monotonous contract language.

I can happily report that those fears were proven wrong almost immediately, and proved to be wrong throughout the entirety of the course. 

The Process

Early on in the course, Alaina split our class into four groups, each tasked with creating their own hypothetical Language Service Provider (LSP). Our group decided to tackle localizing the information page for the company Supermassive Games. Playing off of Supermassive’s black hole imagery, we decided to call our LSP EventHorizon, and based on the top-6 languages in the games industry, we decided to localize the page into Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. With that foundation, we set about creating our company page.

To organize our company and client information, we turned to a site called DokuWiki to create a central hub for our work. We began by outlining our company and all of our employees, and over the weeks we continued to expand the site to include project information, our contracted language talents, the necessary templates we’d use to standardize future projects, and so on. As we got into the swing of handling the sitemap, our DokuWiki came to be an incredibly helpful resource for information management throughout the project.

At the same time as we built our DokuWiki site, we also worked at creating a workflow system to keep our LSP’s process running smoothly over the weeks. For this, we turned to the site Trello, which lets its users create boards where team members can maintain a clean, easily manageable workflow system to help track a project from start to finish. This proved to be a huge boon to our project, as it allowed us to keep our processes in check (sometimes literally with the checklists feature) while also providing a physical map of the before, during, and after stages of the project.

The final tool we implemented was the OneDrive feature provided by Microsoft’s Outlook application. We used OneDrive to organize our administrative, preparation, and deliverable files throughout every stage of the process. However, there were some downsides to the system as well. We noticed along the way that once uploaded, files would occasionally lock themselves in such a way that renaming or even deleting them was impossible. As a result, our folders were sometimes not as well organized as we would have liked, but with standardized file naming conventions, it at least became easy to distinguish the actual files from their un-editable imposters.

These three tools were boons that helped us throughout the process, and managing our systems without them would have been a difficult feat.

Slip-Ups and Other Roadblocks

That’s not to say, however, that our project went without a hitch. On the contrary, our group had several stumbles along the way, but those issues proved to be stepping stones for us to better ourselves for the future.

At the beginning of the project, we decided as a team to use Facebook Messenger as our primary source of contact, but while Messenger allows for users to tag notifications, it’s also a hub for non-business related communication as well, and several times we lost track of messages, or left messages read but unattended to. We all knew our own responsibilities for our own deliverables, but it was easy to forget to check in with the team during our busy weeks.

We also had issues with tracking our time through the application TopTracker. TopTracker prompts its users to label their time, and our group at times failed to maintain proper labels for the duty at hand. This made quoting difficult and, though we came in under the time we originally quoted, the inconsistencies in what we initially promised the client and what we eventually presented them with would, in a real situation, perhaps show our inexperience and prevent the client from returning to our LSP.

Still, as I mentioned before, these rough spots illuminated areas where we could improve, and by having those failures now, we’re less likely to make them in the future when it really counts towards our careers.

Growing Through Experience

Having a foundation in the more structural side of management, including all the business speak and proper systematic understanding of the managerial role, is absolutely important to being an efficient manager. However, more than that, this course taught me that the most important, integral skill anyone going into Localization Project Management can have is the ability to collaborate effectively and conscientiously with your team, your clients, and any and all collaborators along the way. Good communication is the core of any team, and maintaining effective channels for instruction, critique, and praise is necessary for a project to come to its conclusion while also fostering a productive environment for future projects to come.