When I first realized I had found a new career (2010) I wrote this article on becoming a localization project manager. I’d already been an LPM for 4 years without really realizing it was a profession. The LPM article is really about how to apply project management skills to the linguistic industry.
My experience and the industry has changed immensely since I first realized it was an industry. Over the coming months I’ll use this blog to expand my coverage of localization, machine translation, and AI. I’ll particularly focus on what I’ve learned about designing localization processes for large enterprises.
From my work at Amazon I’ve garnered a great deal of information about the challenges of localization in large enterprises. So this blog will argue that enterprises should be looking more holistically at their globalization and localization efforts. This can be accomplished with the right mechanisms even at highly siloed enterprises with a lot of technical and process debt. But for that to happen there needs to be a team (or just a very passionate fanatic) to structure the work correctly.
For a large portion of my time at Amazon I was the fanatic. Eventually with a lot of effort, and a little luck..I .”proved what once was only imagined,” as William Blake would say.
