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To earn some extra cash in 1982, I worked for a German businessman doing backstage technical interpretation for American theater companies touring Europe. The American lighting designers and the European backstage teams had different visions of what constitutes quality, so I had to negotiate compromise. That’s when I discovered localization, although I didn’t know it at the time.
Later, after completing a German degree in business administration, I joined a distributor of Borland software that translated the products into German. That’s when I discovered software localization in the classical sense.
After immigrating to Canada in 1994, I held a series of jobs on the buyer and the supplier sides of the industry. When the dot-com bubble burst, no localization jobs were to be had. I did an Master of Business Administration (MBA) intending to escape out of the industry. But I experienced an epiphany and realized that localization was in my blood. But I needed a new perspective.
So, I focused on technology. I leveraged my German language skills to do some technical and presales marketing for several German translation technology providers. I also wrote articles for MultiLingual. Being immersed in translation technology eventually led me to memoQ.
In the late 1980s when I got into localization, there was little accumulated industry knowledge and there were few best practices. We figured everything out from the bottom up. These were the days when we had to calculate how long it would take a package of floppy disks with the resource files to get to Ireland and back by package courier to add to the total localization turnaround time, or how long it would take a product box to get produced with localized screenshots. This has changed, but on the other hand, 35 years later, we still have software developers hard-coding strings!
So, there are still some old problems to be addressed, but many new problems as well. There are many new and bright minds in the industry addressing them. But the basic methods of problem-solving have not changed much.
I take the greatest pleasure in mentoring less-experienced industry professionals, whether they are my colleagues, representatives of customers, or individuals who come to events such as the Localization Institute’s Translation Technology Roundtable or the Toronto Localization Unconference — both of which I co-organize and moderate in addition to my work at memoQ.
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Curiosity is the most important quality for thriving in the localization industry. Curiosity drives translation professionals to engage in life-long learning that keeps the industry evolving.
A sense of personal pride in accuracy is second to curiosity. Accuracy is vital to our industry, although the real world sometimes demands that we learn to compromise when “good enough” suffices. That’s hard to do when accuracy is in our nature. It can require sophisticated judgment that can take years to acquire. One of the first things I had to learn when I began writing more for publication was to detach my ego from my writing! It was not easy.
Finally, I have learned over the years that problems are not resolved by opinions; they are resolved by solutions. Therefore, I strive to have no opinions, but to offer constructive and creative solution options to those who seek them, and let others make informed decisions. In that way, they learn and grow, and are empowered to thrive on their own.
Richard is an example of a person whose commitment is relentless and whose work is filled with passion and deep respect for the customers he works with. He’s the person you need to get things done. He’s worked in multiple roles in his career in the localization industry, managing teams as well as working with technical documentation and requests for proposal (RFPs). He’s always combined his people skills with his domain knowledge, and stayed focused on adding value for the customer.
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