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About Me

I have a passion for interactive entertainment and technology, and am interested in creating and curating content for the modern world.

Exceptional language, writing, proofing, editing and speaking ability; eager to learn and apply new and varied skills. Extroverted and unafraid to create new connections, and has a proven ability to maintain and nurture professional networks.

Proof of Concept: Localizing a Unity Game

December 14, 2018

This semester at MIIS, we worked on some techniques for localizing games in Android, iOS, and Unity. While it certainly helps to know some coding for things like this, applications like Android Studio and the Unity Personal editor can go a long way to making anyone with a little computer knowledge an amateur software localizer.

As a proof of concept for our final project, we worked on localizing an open-source game from English to Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. It took a while to find an open source game that worked and was appropriate for our needs, but we eventually settled on the game Terra Vita: a simple puzzle game created as part of the Global Game Jam. You can try out the game at this link if you like, or download the source code and edit it yourself.

The point of the game is to use two different kinds of satellites to create a path for messages to travel from Earth to a distant planet to help with terraforming. But asteroids and black holes getting in the way means you have to be creative about the path you use, while also trying to keep your expenses under a budget.

It’s a bit buggy, and falls short of most of the mechanics; for example, there’s no actual penalty for going over budget, and the way that asteroids interfere with your path is inconsistent. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting premise and, for our purposes, perfect to localize, as it contains a variety of text and no language picker. Also, it’s free, so I can’t complain too much.

We started the process by identifying all of the translatable text in the game and extracting it. We fully expected there to be some images that needed localizing, but it turned out that the title screen and everything else was just formatted text, and so this part of the process was simple. However, there were some interesting bits of text in the code that pointed to screens of the game that were never shown when playing, so we removed those from the extracted text data.

Next came the translation. Since this was just a proof of concept, we only ran everything through Google Translate. However, the Japanese and Chinese translations resulted in some bad cases of text bleeding out of the text boxes or getting cut off, so we had to occasionally do some creative translation in parts to shorten everything up. When we absolutely could not shorten the translation any more through editing, we ended up simply making the text itself smaller.

Once the translation was finished, we put the translated text into the game using the I2 Localization Unity asset, a great tool for localizing within Unity. We also made sure to put a language picker on the title screen, which worked out well.

Another interesting challenge was getting all of the currency symbols and number formatting correct for the different locales. For example, we wanted the Chinese version to have the 元 currency symbol be on the right side of the number, instead of the left where the $ for English or ￥ for Japanese sign are.

The currency was set up in such a way that there was inconvenient concatenation within the code as seen above, but one of my group members cleverly got around that, and we eventually had a great looking game screen.

Japanese, with the currency symbol (￥) to the left of the value.
Chinese, with the currency symbol (元) to the right of the value.

That’s the long and short of it! The whole thing worked great. I think if we were to do it over again, I’d like to do something that has some more opportunities for image editing. When we first started this, I thought we were going to need to recreate some of our own assets, but it ended up not being necessary; which is, of course, indicative of good internationalization practices, but I would have still liked the challenge. Next time!

Creating a Talent Management Office

December 13, 2018

Creating a Vendor Management Office — or “Talent Management Office” (TMO) per the growing trend — for language services is much the same as establishing any new department within a company. You need to decide who the main operators of it will be, their responsibilities, and how they are organized. As a TMO, you will also need to determine the onboarding process for the vendors — talent — that you’ll be taking on. This includes screening and contacting potential talent, doing a background review, testing their linguistic skill, and then performing the actual onboarding process.

All of this requires some specific documentation — some familiar, some that might be new. An initial questionnaire to get a good snapshot of the candidates is a good idea, as well as keeping a database of all the talent you run into. This database can include background information and a scorecard referring to the linguistic test. And of course, an Independent Contractor Agreement (ICA) is a must-have.

  • Best practices
    • Team Organizational Chart & Job Description
    • Roles/Authority
    • Talent Onboarding Process
    • Contract Management
  • Onboarding Processes
    • Screening & Initial Contact
    • Request for Information
    • Due Diligence Review
    • Linguistic Testing
    • Onboarding
  • Templates & Documentation
    • New Talent Questionnaire
    • Talent Database
    • Independent Contractor Agreement
    • Test/Scorecard

In this post I will outline a (fictional) example of a TMO established within a medical translation and interpretation language services provider (LSP). This example is the result of weeks of work by myself and my team members in a Talent Management course at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, led by Alaina Brandt.

Our fictional LSP is called MediTrans Inc., which specializes in medical translation and interpretation. The sensitive nature of medical information informed many of our decisions going forward.

In this scenario, MediTrans is a smallish LSP, and the TMO only has six people. The following titles and descriptions are based on research we did on similar job postings around the web, customized for our purposes.

Head of Talent Office

Develops and drives our recruiting strategy and execution to support our rapid growth. Optimizes the talent acquisition function and processes.

Financial Manager

Reviews financial reports, monitors accounts, and prepares activity reports and financial forecasts.

Talent Manager

Provides analyses to the organization on vendors, costs, and ensures the terms of contracts are followed by all parties.

Recruiters (2)

Work with outside agencies to discover new talent. They also review resumes, explore job search websites for potential talent and contact those individuals personally.

Interview potential candidates, searching for talents that match the specific needs of Meditrans’ work. Introduce new hires to the company and walk them onboarding process. Facilitate all new-hire paperwork of candidates who meet the expectations of the job.

HR Coordinator to TMO

Works with MediTrans’s HR department to develop policy and direct and coordinates human resources activities, such as employment, compensation, labor relations, benefits, training, and employee services.

We used the software Process Street to help with organizing the onboarding process. Process Street is sort of a checklist software with a bunch of other bells and whistles, like the ability to make automated lists that will send out emails that auto-fill with client info. The following is a snapshot of out Process Street… process.

One thing in particular that we focused on as a medical translation/interpretation LSP was strict requirements for contractors. Our drafting process included a profile screening for staff performing the onboarding, with harsh penalties for any issues with references, reviews, and online professional presence, in addition to the obvious penalties for plagiarism and illegitimate payment methods.

Our translation test, with material we payed special attention to highlighted.

We also required at least a year of experience in medial translation, as well as the ability to keep sensitive information confidential. When evaluating the test translation, we pay special attention to meaning errors, additions, or omissions, and less attention to formatting and tone. This is to ensure maximum understanding in a field where any errors or ambiguity can mean the difference between life and death.

If the candidate gets a good score and passes the background test, they’re placed in our database ready to be worked with in the future; failing candidates are also placed in the database so that we can keep track of individuals that we’ve already tested, and to make sure we don’t accidentally perform redundant work in the future.

The onboarding process for many companies can look very similar, but care should be taken to customize the process for every industry and, frequently, every project. The above can give you some ideas for your own process, but remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

One piece of advice, however: don’t cut corners that sacrifice your talent’s (vendor’s; contractor’s; etc) happiness. There are only so many professionals out there, and often their online community is vocal; if you treat them right, your returns will be greater than any shady cost-cutting ever could be.

Mini-Portfolio for TMS

May 14, 2018

Many of my posts these past few months came about through the Translation Management Systems course at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, taught by Adam Wooten. My most recent post comparing GlobalLink to XTM is part of that! As well as a few professional presentations, including my posts on a few TMS recommendations and the needs of a TMS for crowdsourcing. This post will be the last of that series, and so will detail our largest project: a group, test study of using the the SDL WorldServer translation management system on a repeatable job, with the goal of exploring automation possibilities and how to manage repeatable tasks.

Our group decided to use the changelog for LinkedIn’s Ads API for our project, under the assumption that it would be something that could reasonably be repeated frequently as LinkedIn came out with more updates, and would have fairly regular language that could be automated easily.

Our first step was to create a proposal, or statement of work, detailing our idea and all the things we’d need to do to accomplish it. We had a little fun with the name of our mock company; this course’s initials are TMS, and our professor’s daughter famously likes snakes. Thus, “TMS: Tiny Mewing Snakes” was born.

You can find all of the files for the project here, including the Deliverables, our presentation on the lessons learned, and our statement of work.