What Lurks Beneath The Surface

As I headed to San Jose for Renato Beninatto’s IMUG (International Multilingual User Group) talk, I was understandably unsure of what to expect. Only a month into my studies at the Middlebury Institute, I was really only just starting to dip my toes into the larger understanding of the localization industry. Of course I knew the basic gist of what localization meant, but I’d only just begun to understand all the disparate parts that made up the industry as a whole. Coming into the school, the vague concept I’d had of localization was simply that it was translation, but with a little bit of cultural pizzaz and some technology sprinkled in to help out. I had thought my education would be language first, tools second.

But the truth has been a different story. Localization encompasses so many different subsets of professions that make up the larger picture. A translator is just as important to a localization project as a project manager, and both are just as important as an editor, or a proof reader, or any other one of the many cogs that come together to make the entire machine work.

As this picture came more and more into focus over that first month, a nagging thought started to form at the back of my head, because there were so many jobs that made up the industry, but all those jobs were filled by people and those people were just that—people. People are flawed, and human-run work takes time and money too. As I started getting more in-depth introductions into CAT tools, for every position that I’d imagined a person filling, a piece of technology would come around to prove to me how easily a machine could simplify the production. As I saw how that simplification has gotten more and more precise over the years and only continues to grow, I started to wonder how small the human-input to a project could become. What kinds of jobs would eventually become obsolete over the next few years? Where would I manage to find my niche in the industry without inevitably setting myself up for failure against a bigger and better machine? That broad view of the industry had slowly started to shrink again, and the water I’d been dipping my toes into seemed more murky than ever.

Thankfully, Beninatto’s talk helped to alleviate some of those early anxieties, and started a trend that I would hear from many more speakers that I would listen to after him.

The Balance Between Humanity & Technology

Right from the get-go, Beninatto began listing-off technology used in the business—SDL Trados, MemoQ, inten.to, and the like—but before we could feel too intimidated by all the machines taking over our jobs, he put things into very simple perspective. The technology side of the business, he told us, made up a $775 million industry. However, the human services side of things blew that completely out of the water with a whopping $49 billion.

This is because, as Beninatto explained, translation and localization are both through processes; in other words, they are jobs that help other businesses and people reach an end. There will always be work to be done, because the industries where translators and localizers are being used are always evolving and changing. As one telling example, he said, “When the economy’s good, we translate contracts. When the economy’s bad, we translate lawsuits,” that is to say that no matter what the state of the world, someone will always need human-quality language services. Thankfully for those of us studying the industry, it’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.

So What Does That Mean For The Future?

Translation technology may help with the process, but they will never eclipse the human input. They are tools that help us take our work to the highest, most accurate and appropriate limits that they can reach, but they work in tandem with our own abilities. As the technology gets better, we as translators and localizers don’t get more obsolete. Quite the opposite in fact! The better and more well integrated the tools we employ, the better and more manageable our work becomes. They enhance the experience, not hinder it. And even beyond that, any problems those technologies pose us are only better incentive to evolve the industry and improve it. People, as flawed as they can be at times, are adaptive, and strive towards goals in the face of adversity. As long as the industry makes use of the elements that the human perspective and influence can bring to it—accurate, appropriate context, good customer service, content conversion, and the like—then our necessity to the industry will never suffer.

Not a bad lesson to learn at the start of a localization career, to be sure!