Event in June 2021
Abstract
Following the success of the first EduinLoc Town Hall meeting, we’re back with a new session to keep inspiring the industry to evolve and thrive, especially when it comes to educating the leaders of the future. In the first meeting, we interviewed Stephan Cocron and we heard his very interesting insights on education and the localization profession in the United States. This time, we want to focus on Europe. That is why we have invited an experienced localization professional and a seasoned academic and researcher so that they can have an open conversation about the opportunities and limitations of our industry and the education at a university level. Join us to listen to this thought-provoking conversation and be part of it during our Q&A session and networking conversations that will happen right after the event.
Agenda:
- Welcome & housekeeping rules [5 min]
- Conversation between industry and academia [20 min]
- Q&A from the audience [10 min]
- Networking session [55 min]
Alina Secară
Senior Scientist at University of Vienna
Alina Secară is Senior Scientist in the University of Vienna Centre for Translation Studies, where she investigates accessibility practices and technologies, and teaches subtitling, captioning and multimedia localization processes and technologies. A UK Stagetext accredited theatre captioner, she also worked with theatres across the UK to integrate captioning for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing and provided customized hands-on training in subtitling and captioning to EU and UN in-house linguists. For over a decade she managed the MA in Audiovisual Translation Studies at the UK University of Leeds in the UK, where she maintains a Visiting Researcher position, and was part of a variety of EU-funded e-learning translation technologies projects such as eCoLoTrain, eCoLoMedia and DigiLing.
Esther Curiel
Localization Operations Manager at Indeed
Esther Curiel is a global content and localization expert who enjoys enabling international growth.
She is currently a Localization Operations Manager with Indeed, a job site available in more than 60 countries, where she leads their Content Effectiveness team.
In her 20+ years in the industry, Esther has held various production roles and hired and managed teams on the vendor and client side of the industry. Esther is an active member in the localization community: she is a board member of Women in Localization Ireland, a co-organizer of the Dublin Localization Unconference, and has been a judge and mentor at the Process Innovation Challenge.
Following the success of the first EduinLoc Town Hall meeting, our second session – Europe Edition – was held on June 24th 5 PM to 6:30 PM (CEST) to keep inspiring the industry to evolve and thrive, especially when it comes to educating the leaders of the future. In this meeting, we interviewed Alina Secară, Senior Scientist at University of Vienna, and Esther Curiel, Localization Operations Manager at Indeed, and heard their very interesting insights on education and the localization profession in Europe. Their open conversation about the opportunities and limitations of our industry and the education at a university level helped start a discussion among all the other participants at this Town Hall.
Check out a detailed report on conversations in our networking session!
Are academic institutions
keeping up with
the pace of change in the industry?
Stephan Cocron from Salesforce pointed out that based on his experience that most people who’ve majored in translation or language specialities lack specific skills which contributes to the problem. Students usually show a lack of industry experience when in the process of seeking work/ getting hired.
He thinks it’s great that there are some online educational programs available but doesn’t think that certain roles or career paths are being adequately mapped and detailed to students. He sees three paths to existing roles/ needs for global companies: product managers, technical program managers and QA managers. It would be great to see more prescribed academic paths with exposure to necessary technologies. At present, no masters degree is available in any of these.
Participants at this table all agreed that we have a lot of industry veterans and wise, experienced people joining the EDUinLOC initiative and ready to share but need to attract more students, newbies, etc. It was suggested that people set aside time for “Open Office Hours” to meet with students and newbies to answer their questions and discuss where they want to go and what they want to do in the industry and how to get there.
Perspectives from professors and industry professionals
This is a conversation between industry and academia.
Andre Hemker, who was a Master’s of Translation and then Wordbee CEO, brought us with his unique perspective in both academia and industry. From the industry perspective, we are solving day to day problems, working with clients with challenges. Students can benefit from industry experience, for example, you could assign students to compare translations and use that as a learning tool. In this process, it would be great if students can use CAT tools from the start.
On the other hand, academia doesn’t need to hide the fact that they are working with industry – we are offering education. Translation is a hands-on activity and we need to train our students but also offer them the opportunity to research the industry. We have little time to train students in specialized fields. That is one of our problems.
We should tell the students early on that there are so many professions connected to the field of localization: sales people, account managers, support people, software developers, project managers, proofreaders, solutions architects, QA specialists, marketing, websites, software, front-end developers, etc. We can get students to realize: Maybe there is something for me! Students need perspective and ideas for the future. There are so many options, and academia could expose the students to this.
Academia would make the connection that languages are a portal to amazing jobs and careers. A translator could eventually end up being the head of a large localization department at Facebook.
What kind of specialization should academia offer? Just give them a mindset that they are in the full power of how they can integrate themselves into a field with their translation degree. It is necessary for students to understand translation processes and see themselves in a particular role. Maybe different universities offer different specializations.
How to embed technology
in education
The table was hosted by Jan Grodecki, with attendees from both academia and industry, who are :
- Dragos Ciobanu, Professor of Computational Terminology and Machine Translation at University of Vienna; undergraduate teaching
- Tabea De Wille,Localization Researcher, Lecturer and Consultant, University of Limmerick
- Gina Fevrier, Sr PM, BMC LPM, Florida
- Tom Alwood, Consultant, University of Maryland
- Gökhan Doğru, University of Barcelona, Masters Program, Consultant
They pointed out we need to respond to the requests from industry:
- More Agile
- Engineering
- UX
- Quality Management
They agreed that usually the taught projects are not realistic; classes should present real live projects based on standard scenarios.
When it comes to tools, many providers offer academic programs and free licenses for educators and students. We should also make students be aware of open source options, such as for example OmegaT, Open TMs, GLobalSight, and Okapi Framework. For beginners there are free courses offered on LinkedIn, DigiLink, EDX, Dublin City University, and Portsmouth. Tom Alwood also shared best practices at the University of Maryland and reported that they teach CAT, TMS, for translators.
They pointed out that the biggest learning effect would be the crisis mode, yet it is not feasible for classes. A common scenario in many universities is that linguistic programs do not teach localization and students can’t take credit for other language related courses, which is something that we still need to work on.
Gina Fevrier is interested in how to MT content, e.g. eLearning. There are many modern technologies in this regard, for example, Amazon Polly Plugin for website MT.
Participants also pointed out that it is important for us to distinguish between Education vs Training. For example, syllabus needs to be updated dynamically, to be flexible to a degree (Tabea) and approval processes (Gokhan), adjustable semester to semester (Tom), and with proper assessment (Dragos). Gina and Oksana gave some details on the success story of The Localization Institute.
Data analysis
in QM
Kateřina Gašová hosted the QM roundtable, sharing general best practices in quality management, over specific repetitive/challenging scenarios related to accepting/providing feedback, or differences in quality definitions for different quality expectations and content use-cases as well as differences in quality evaluations of subtitles as opposed to standard content, post-editing and quality, etc.
Eva Klaudinyova, Peng Wang, Stephan Corcron, and Ulrich Henes joined the table and discussed best practices of quality management in a MT driven translation process. Kateřina pointed out that language data analysis and getting insights from the analysis is important for us to control the quality of MT. Peng added that when we analyze the data, it is important that the analysis is fair and reasonable for all stakeholders.