S04E11: Career Paths for Localization Professionals

Intro

Hello and welcome to the Translation Company Talk, a weekly podcast show focusing on translation services and the language industry. The Translation Company Talk covers topics of interest for professionals engaged in the business of translation, localization, transcription, interpreting, and language technology. The Translation Company Talk is sponsored by Hybrid Lynx. Your host is Sultan Ghaznawi with today’s episode.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Welcome to another episode of the Translation Company Talk podcast. I’m sure everyone in the localization field has thought about what other opportunities exist outside of this industry that could use the skills and knowledge gained here. To discuss localization career paths, I have invited a friend and a great leader with a tremendous experience in enterprise localization and beyond.

 

Paula Hunter is a globalization professional with nearly 25 years of experience in driving international success for both large enterprises and wildly successful start-ups. She has spent the past 10 years of her career building out a mature localization team and program at Avigilon, now a part of the Motorola Solutions video security and access control business that focuses on globalization, strategy alignment, quality, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Paula’s passion for leadership and driving positive change is fuelled by connecting, developing, and empowering people, aligning vision, cross-functionality, and optimizing ways of working through curiosity about others and leading by influence.

 

She has recently transitioned out of localization and into the new role of Director of Business Operations and Product Chief of Staff, reporting into the CVP of Product Development for the Enterprise Physical Security Organization within Motorola Solutions. In this role, she is focused on driving alignment, accountability, and communications across the organization of 700 employees distributed across nine sites globally. Paula is based in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

 

Paula, welcome back to the Translation Company Talk podcast.

 

Paula Hunter

Thank you. It is great to be back, Sultan.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So how have you been? It’s been a while since we last spoke. How are things going at your end?

 

Paula Hunter

Things are going really well. As you know, I started a new role within my organization, I guess, starting in February. So, things are quite exciting. I’m transitioning my former role, leading the localization team to my backfill. And yeah, things are exciting, learning lots of new things.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m so happy to hear that. Let’s kick off this conversation. And for those people listening to you for the first time, can you give them a quick introduction and tell us what you’ve been up to besides your new role lately? I know you’re involved with localization a lot everywhere.

 

Paula Hunter

Yeah, absolutely. So, my name is Paula Hunter. I am based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I’ve been in the localization industry for nearly 25 years now and have spent the last 10 at a Vancouver-based company called Avigilon, which was acquired by Motorola Solutions nearly four years ago. At Avigilon, that was really where the bulk of my career growth happened. It’s been an incredible ride. I built up a localization team and program from the ground up and scaled it up as the business grew, both organically and through additional acquisitions after Motorola acquired Avigilon. And we created this newly formed business unit. Along the way, I also inherited the technical documentation team. Together with the new manager, we built up a team of eight tech writers. So, in total, I was leading a combined team of 13 people.

 

So, as I mentioned, since the acquisition of Avigilon, Motorola Solutions acquired several more companies in the video security and access control space, which the localization team has onboarded into our localization program framework. I’m super proud of the team of leaders that I’ve built in the innovations and the resulting success that they’ve achieved. And over that time, the last 10 years in particular, I’ve developed a passion for growing and empowering people and aligning and connecting teams and continuous process optimization. Yeah. So most recently I was offered a new role as director of business operations and product chief of staff reporting into our head of product development. So, this is a very exciting opportunity for me to be able to leverage a lot of the things that I learned and developed a passion for on a greater scale.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m very excited to hear all about it. So, in terms of your expanded horizons, the new responsibilities you’ve taken, why don’t you tell us a little bit, what does that entail?

 

Paula Hunter

Yeah. So, this came about because our organization went through a reorg that included some change in leadership. And as a result, the new corporate vice president of product development needed someone to help execute on his vision, on the initiatives. We’re an organization of 700 engineers or around 600 engineers and then product managers, user experience. And so, when this opportunity came about, the description really hit so many aspects of my current role, as I mentioned before. So again, my passion about connecting and empowering people, driving positive change through process optimization, and building a strong culture.

 

And so having that opportunity to have an impact on a much larger scale was really, really exciting for me. I never thought I would leave the globalization industry, but this opportunity would also allow me to learn more about other aspects of the business and be able to sprinkle little bits of internationalization throughout the broader organization.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How exciting. Given your experience, Paula, in the recent transition to this new role, I want to speak to you about career paths and localization. I mean, it’s a topic that I haven’t heard anybody else talk about. So, we have a lot of very talented localization managers and colleagues in that space that would be interested to learn how they can use their skills to move in other areas of the organization. So how about you tell me what is the current state of career development and enterprise localization? Where do people go? And, you know, is there a specific framework for this or it’s just basically it’s open to interpretation?

 

Paula Hunter

I think a little bit of everything. So successful localization professionals, I think, have a lot of specific strengths and passions, which include curiosity, empathy, the drive to innovate and building business cases. These are all extremely valuable in so many different areas of any business in which we operate in, in all areas of any business, in my opinion. And the key is to use these very strengths to both find and create these opportunities for us.

 

Localizers need to find champions within the departments we support using these champions to help you understand what their challenges are, asking a lot of questions and throwing around some ideas on proposals on how you can help them. That will enable you to educate them and also learn more about how other teams operate and maybe there’s opportunity. Maybe you discover that you’re really interested in one of these other departments.

 

So, in my case, both my role and every role that I created on the team were driven by an opportunity to fill a gap in the organization. There are always gaps everywhere. You know, everybody has their specialization and localizers have this really unique position to identify them if we dig in and ask questions.

 

You know, most localizers work with so many different departments. And so, we do see that that’s bird’s eye view. And if you’re curious, you know, you can dig a little deeper with some of these stakeholders. People love to share their successes and they love to share their struggles. If you’re an ear for them, you’ll be surprised at the wealth of opportunities that exist when you’re approaching from a creative problem-solving perspective and how many ideas you have right off the bat to help them.

 

You know, as a localizer, like we do, we’re neutral in the sense that we’re focused on the localization of the content and the impact on our global customers. But how marketing or engineering or technical documentation, how their processes operate, we have that outside perspective where we can help them identify ways of optimizing their processes from the perspective of how we interact with them.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That being said, Paula, you’ve had a very interesting journey, of course. And I would like to know how you found interest in localization. What skills did you need to acquire and how did those skills help you create this framework for your career post localization?

 

Paula Hunter

So how did I get into localization? I think like most people, we kind of fell into it. You know, 25 years ago, it was pretty new. So, my background, high level. I’ve always loved languages in high school, university and I ended up majoring in Hispanic and Italian studies at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island. But then when I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in the in the mid 90s, I applied for what felt like one million jobs ranging from teaching Spanish at community centers and colleges. I applied for working at a radio station because at the time I was obsessed with making mixtapes. I thought maybe that could be an opportunity for me. Management positions at rec centers. I’d been a lifeguard and fitness instructor and swim instructor, you know, for many, many years. But with a Bachelor of Arts, there weren’t really that many opportunities.

 

And so, I actually I had a friend of a friend who had created a business in Mexico running a program at a hotel. And it was, she ran a fitness class. She was essentially like an activities coordinator for the guests at a hotel. She spoke Spanish. She did classes. And her role was to keep the guests at the hotel so they would spend their money there. And so, I took that. I did that for a year. You know, it combined my experience with Spanish, but that was fun for a year. But it was not very fruitful. And I knew that I needed something more. So, I came back and tried to figure out what to study next. I was leaning towards getting a master’s in Spanish so I could be qualified to teach at the college level. But as I was applying for that, this application came across my lap for a computing science program that was targeting non-tech people, in an effort to bring people and more diverse backgrounds into the tech industry, really focused on women. Most of the program was comprised of women with arts degrees. So, I thought this is perfect. The requirement was no technical experience, which was exactly me. I applied and got in and the program had a co-op program and one of the co-op jobs was localization. And I’d never heard of that before. So, I applied and got that, and I thought this is perfect. It is my love of languages with computing science. And that was how I fell in.

 

So, in terms of you asking about localization specific skills, most of my learnings, there wasn’t a lot that I was aware of in terms of education. I mean, now we have the Localization Institute, which is offering, increasing their course offerings all the time. Most of my learnings were on the job and attending the LocWorld conferences that came up a couple of times a year. I started joining online communities and learning from peers and then taking various courses and webinars and workshops as the opportunities arose. There’s so many more now. In those days, there were not many. Most of it was on the job learning. But there’s so many resources and opportunities now.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, if you’re just starting out in localization with an enterprise, you’re learning a lot of things, right? So, what kind of skills do you need to successfully deliver on the ask for localization from the company? Where do you acquire these skills from and at what cost in terms of time and possibly money?

 

Paula Hunter

So, I would say even more important than skills in the traditional sense is, and I’ll talk a lot about this, I think in our conversation, is attitude and a keen sense of self-awareness and the ability to see things holistically, to see the big picture. It’s so easy to get buried deep into the details and get focused on that.

 

If you can work on taking that step back and seeing things from a big picture, I think that is a skill that is extremely important in our industry and many others. If you have this kind of curious attitude and you love to learn, I believe the skills will come from identifying opportunities to grow and learn. With that caveat, the skills I do feel are critical. And again, I don’t know if this is skill or character trait, but curiosity, proactive communication, do not assume that people know. Over-communicate, over-communicate. Empathy, understanding what other people are going through and trying to help them. And the organization and synthesis of information. Also, a passion for process optimization, actively looking for ways to streamline how things work. A passion for educating and evangelizing, helping others. And a general understanding of how all the departments work in an organization so you can identify those opportunities for alignment and integration and synergies. And of course, internationalization best practices. There’s a ton of resources out there. So having a solid understanding of how to internationalize is definitely the best place to start.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Intuition and attitude, very critical things that you can’t just simply go to school to learn. But as a localization professional, Paula, you constantly have to keep up to speed with the latest trends in technology and processes you just mentioned. That means continuous learning. Is this something that existed in a formal and structured manner, or do you have to access educational tools from the ad hoc institutions or organizations here and there?

 

Paula Hunter

Well, I think both. I can say, and I don’t know if it’s a product of my being involved in the industry 25 years ago when there were fewer resources, but I’ve really leaned on peers in the community. One of the most wonderful things about our community is that everybody that I have encountered is always keen to help. I’ve been curious about different localization roles throughout my career, and so I would literally go to Google, or sorry, LinkedIn, and type in some different roles and find people who have this, look at their profile, reach out to them and ask if I can have 15, 20 minutes of their time. And I’ve never been turned down.

 

And on the flip side, people have also come to me and asked, and this is one of the things that I love about our community. So, there’s a ton of community. There are women in localization, there’s LocLife, there’s your podcast, there’s other podcasts. There’s just so many, there’s so much opportunity to connect with others in the industry and learn and share best practices and troubleshoot together. I mean, there’s also forums that are trying to further and mature the localization industry in general. And these are people, you know, outside their day jobs who are just so passionate. So, you can get involved with these groups and you will learn a ton by just being together with these other localization leaders and trying to further mature our industry.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I think a question every localization professional should ask themselves is about their exit plan. So, if you’re just starting out in localization in a team, basically, you need to have an idea of what do you want to do after localization work is done? What’s your next step? It would be very unusual, of course, if a localization person may want to go into accounting after their tenure in localization. I haven’t heard of that. So how do you determine what your path should look like? You just mentioned support and mentoring, but what kind of support is available in an organization to help you map your journey?

 

Paula Hunter

That’s a really great question. I think there are a lot of opportunities for localizers to branch out and explore other areas to learn and grow in because localization has the opportunity within organizations to touch on literally every aspect of the business. I think the possibilities are endless, even accounting.

 

In general, what I’m starting to see are localizers moving into roles that connect and align people and departments within an organization. This is such a key focus of a localizer and is 100% transferable and often needed within organizations.

 

As I mentioned before, localizers have that unique big picture perspective and bird’s eye view of projects and are really keenly positioned to identify these gaps and connect them, which are in areas that are often even completely unrelated to Loc. I’m starting to see more and more operations roles becoming more popular for ops. There’s DevOps, CloudOps, MarketingOps. I’ve even seen LocOps start to become more of a thing.

 

Chief Operating Officer would be one of the top roles in the ops area. I actually know another localization professional here in Vancouver who was recently promoted to Chief Operating Officer for SAP, for the Canada labs, which was super cool to see. I was really proud. In my case, I was promoted to Director of Business Operations and Chief of Staff. In the job description, the key goals are exactly those, alignment, accountability, and communication. I think, like I said, localizers have this opportunity to identify role gaps in an organization and make a pitch at creating one that excites you and adds value to the business.

 

So, Sultan, on the topic of learning about opportunities in organizations, I can share with you what Motorola Solutions does. Motorola Solutions, I think, is a very unique company within the tech industry because we’ve got employees who have been working there for decades. I just celebrated my tenure, which feels like a lifetime. But there’s people, recently I saw an email of someone retiring after 40 years. It’s not uncommon to see people there celebrating their 20, 25 years there.

 

I think one of the keys to retaining people in Motorola Solutions is how they very strongly believe in job rotation. I’ve heard of employees moving from software development to product management, tech support to engineering, and even software engineering to sales, and then back to development management. Organizations like Motorola really proactively promote this sort of career diversity, which I think is great. If your organization doesn’t do this today, then why not suggest it if that’s something that you’re curious about?

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

What type of learning opportunities does a localization job offer to professionals in this area? You’ve been through this. What kind of skills do you develop on this job that you can transfer to downstream jobs, like whatever’s next?

 

Paula Hunter

I think we talked about this a little bit earlier. The specific skills to call out are really curiosity and empathy, and digging into the things that are hard. As humans, we tend to knock off things on our to-do list that are easy and enjoyable. But if you look at the areas that feel a bit daunting or you don’t feel completely confident in, there’s always people in the organization or in our community who can help you and support you, and who I’m sure people ultimately like to help people, and they like to feel valuable. If you can make a point of looking at those harder, more daunting things and tackle those, then I think that is an opportunity for you to grow within an organization.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I was referring more to skills such as customer service, skills such as vendor management, skills such as content management that normally you wouldn’t have, but this job pushes you in that direction to learn those things. I think those can be transferred. In your opinion, in your experience, what type of skills, things that I probably haven’t even thought of, do you develop while performing this localization job?

 

Paula Hunter

I guess are you referring to things like on the vendor side? So, negotiating contracts, negotiating pricing, working through processes with your vendor. I mean, we outsource a lot of what we do for our team, and I think we’re not unique in that sense. So, finding ways to collaborate with your team and work with other teams, identifying benefits on both sides.

 

Budgeting is a big one, learning how to manage money. Localization budgets are often one of the highest, and so organizations can be very sensitive to that. And If you can find ways in your processes and working together with your vendor to bring costs down, and then also making sure that you are aligning your localization investment with the priorities of the business, that will force you to have those discussions with leadership and product management and find out where are we going as an organization to make sure that we’re aligning our investment. That’s an area that you can learn more about budgeting, learn about product management, learn about business priorities.

 

Marketing, as a localizer, you’re reviewing the content for marketing and educating and evangelizing on best practices. You may discover, oh, this is actually really fun. And you might see an opportunity to contribute even outside of localization. UX UI is another one. Localization often partners very closely with that team, and so there’s opportunity to learn more about those practices.

 

Yeah, I mean, just back to the vendor side, my very first localization manager position was at Nokia, and I was actually backfilling the localization manager there who was moving into procurement because she discovered that she really loved, like one of her favorite parts was working with vendors. And so, you know, she went into working with suppliers and vendors for the hardware for mobile phones.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And technology is, of course, at the heart of localization today. Knowing how to manage technology such as TMSs or CAD tools, it’s a huge undertaking and quite frankly, it teaches you everything about workflows, content flows, resource assignments, and so on. How can these technology skills be put to good use in your future career?

 

Paula Hunter

So, I think, you know, working with all these technologies, I think, first of all, it builds confidence that you can effectively learn new tools and grow and scale within your organization. I think using the technologies, it’s important to recognize that with these technologies, it’s the planning, the success of the implementation and usage is really the planning and thought process behind the implementation of them. Recognize, you need to understand what the problem is your technology is going to solve, what changes need to happen within your team, within other teams, with your processes to effectively implement with minimal disruption and risk. Understanding all aspects of an end-to-end workflow and making sure that there’s clear communication and alignment before, during, and after the implementation of the technology. And then understanding the problems that cannot be solved by the technology and mitigating those.

 

I think, you know, sales teams are very good at selling solutions. You need to be aware of the things that it cannot solve and make sure that you are factoring that in. So, it’s just important to recognize that those are skills in the background when you are using technology.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Paula let’s change the topic for a moment. How did you determine that your current role, the new one that you’ve taken on, is something you wanted to pursue given your localization career and experience?

 

Paula Hunter

So, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, so my career at Avigilon really provided me the opportunity to have access to so many different areas in the business. I reported to the head of product management and also to the head of engineering at different times in my career here. And in both teams, I identified areas where we could improve as an organization because I had that visibility into many things that were going on. And as the localization and tech doc teams continued to develop more and more leadership, it afforded me the time to start digging into some of these areas. And I also realized, I mean, my ultimate objective was to improve these areas further upstream so that it would ultimately improve the teams that we operated as well as the teams we worked with. So, I started taking on some of these larger picture initiatives and discovered that I really, really enjoyed it.

 

So late last year when this reorg happened and this new role was created, it just felt like the perfect fit. It wasn’t really a goal that I was pursuing. Like I was never in my localization role thinking, you know, ultimately, I want to be a director of business ops and product chief of staff. It was more something that evolved by following the aspects of the business that I was passionate about and looking for opportunities to grow and learn and help people. And this is, by the way, this is the same career advice I’m giving my kids. They’re 11 and 14 right now. So, they’re still on the younger side but, you know, follow your passions. Follow what makes you feel good. Follow what gives you that burning desire to learn.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Traditionally, Paula, we’ve seen localization managers working in similar roles like in localization or translation managers and other organizations or even on the supply side and vice versa. This industry is very versatile and dynamic and there are a lot of different things to do. But what other industries can localization professionals transfer to with their skills, knowledge, and experience?

 

Paula Hunter

Honestly, again, any. I would say any industry, truly. So, again, looking at what are you passionate about? What are you interested in? What are you curious about? Any little bit of curiosity, you know, find ways to volunteer or find people on LinkedIn who are experts and pick their brains a little bit. Like, I love talking about localization. This is why I’m here talking to you. I talk to other people. Like, it’s one of my passions. So, if you have an interest, if you’re interested in something else, there is guaranteed people out there who are passionate about it and would love to share their knowledge. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in; I believe there will always be a need for connecting people, continuous improvement, and learning.

 

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Sultan Ghaznawi

Most localization managers have some linguistic background as a translator, interpreter or just being bilingual. It helps them manage their localization work easily. They understand code-switching and how translators work. Now, is this a type of cognitive skill or ability that could be applied to other business activities?

 

Paula Hunter

Absolutely. I think that skill that you just described speaks volumes to the ability of adapting messaging for different audiences, right? If you’re a translator and you work in that industry, you are very familiar with the fact that saying, you’re trying to convey a message in one language, it’s never just a direct word-for-word translation. You need to adapt that message to resonate with the audience. And this is a skill that can be transferable in any industry, any department.

 

As a localization manager, for example, even in our industry, you need to translate messages from linguists to project managers to software developers to testers to executives. You need to recognize what is the audience’s motivation and deliver the message in a way that will resonate with them. So, I think coming from a language background is extremely helpful in this regard.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Well, Paula, let’s talk about staying relevant. Our world is undergoing rapid transformation in so many ways. Technology, economy, people, migration, education, innovation, and so on. There are so many things that we have to relearn on a monthly basis, if not daily. How do we prevent becoming obsolete in terms of skills and knowledge as localization professionals?

 

Paula Hunter

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Things are changing so quickly. And we’ve almost gone from a place of, like early in my career, how do I find information? How do I stay on top of it? Now, I am being bombarded by information.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Overloaded.

 

Paula Hunter

Yeah, exactly, its information overload, but we can’t shut that all off. We need to find a balance. Again, always be curious. There’s always opportunity to improve things. Find a way to incorporate lifelong learning into your daily routine in this age of information and data overload. Yeah, I just said that. So, there’s no longer a lack of resources. The key is to identify any areas that really resonate with you or areas where you see opportunity to improve in your own work.

 

Personally, a few of my key resources to keep up to date and engaged are for leadership. I love Harvard Business Review. I subscribe to that. I follow them on LinkedIn. They’ve got great little nuggets, articles of things to keep in mind and personally, I find them very inspiring. Find some LinkedIn connections or influencers, personal connections in areas of interest and follow them and you’ll start seeing the algorithms are quite good. They will feed you content that is interesting to you. And if you find it’s too much, then you connect, disconnect from some online communities and forums such as Women in Localization. They always have great content. LocLife is a forum that I was involved in. So, you know, find ways of incorporating it into your either daily or weekly, put something in your calendar.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

What is the role of our industry and retooling and preparing our workforce with new skills? With the shortage of labour, I don’t know how bad it is now, but still, it’s an issue and a waning interest in languages. We need more awareness about localization. Paula, I’m not advocating for an outflow of talent from the localization industry, but can you talk about what the industry can do in order to enable localization professionals to become better product managers or marketing managers for that matter? I guess the side effect of that would be marketing professionals, for example, with better localization knowledge who will improve the quality of source content going out for translation. Can you talk about that a little bit?

 

Paula Hunter

Yeah. So, you know, a common theme I’ve touched on so far in our discussion is being curious about the processes of our stakeholders. What motivates them? How do they operate?

 

On the topic of marketing, years ago, I attended a conference called Brand to Global, which included, it was really interesting. It was a conference that included both marketing professionals as well as localization professionals. And that was the first time I’d been in a localization-related conference that was not purely localization buyers and vendors. It included the marketers. So, I think we can raise more awareness about this by creating more collaboration spaces between local professionals and other industries, such as conferences like that or communities, forums. And who knows? Maybe we could bring along diverse, maybe we could go the other way and bring some diverse talent from other areas like marketing or UX or development into the wonderful world of localization.

 

So, I think there are opportunities to create these synergies in conferences and other events like that. We, our team, the localization team at our organization, we’ve had a co-op program where we bring in computing science students for eight-month terms. And we have swayed them to the local, we call it, we brought them to the loc side, and we’ve hired two local, two computer, two software developers as localization developers for our team.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Paula, do organizations such as marketing, engineering, or product development, do they value localization experience? And is there enough awareness in those areas about the knowledge, experience, and education of localization professionals?

 

Paula Hunter

So, I think this is completely dependent on the leaders of the departments, the leaders of the organization and the localization professionals within them. I am very proud to say that I believe that the departments in our organization do value localization experience. I’ve been very fortunate that both of my managers, both on the engineering and product management side have been very supportive and are keen to provide platforms for us to share the work that we do. I’ve had the opportunity to bring a lot of the great work that we’ve done into organization town halls, into quarterly business reviews to show our process innovations and improvements and has actually inspired some other team like the software development organisations to continue innovating on process, not just the technology but how we’re delivering it.

 

So, I think as long as we, as localization professionals, can show the value we bring to the organization in terms of what the business values, such as happy global customers, increased revenue, taking load off of developers and content creators, and you make it easy for them to say yes, the localization awareness and value will come.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

If you think about it, Paula, localization involves a lot of management, both people and process and tools. Would you say localization professionals can leverage that experience that as better managers and places like customer service or business development?

 

Paula Hunter

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, this has been my common theme, follow your passion, what are you interested in, what fuels your fire, and dig into it a little bit more. Follow that route. Are you passionate about our global customers having the best customer experience? Or are you passionate about business operations, like are you fascinated about how the marketing operates? How development operates? Or are you interested in how do we grow revenue? What needs to happen outside of translating our content and products to grow our revenue internationally? How do our international sales team operate? How does inside sales work? Are you interested in figuring out how to drive sales by supporting our global sales team? I think localization experience that we gain in our role can be leveraged literally anywhere.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I was going to ask you about the role of localization professionals in terms of dealing with outside vendors and what kind of value that creates, but you’ve already answered that question. So, I’m going to ask you about how localization professionals can weather a downturn in an economy. I mean, there are lots of tech giants in the US that have laid off a lot of people. But as we see now, huge tech giants are actually outsourcing that work to localization vendors, so now there’s demand for localization professionals on the vendor side. What do you have to say about moving between these two sides of the fence?

 

Paula Hunter

I have considered that in my career. One of the things that has brought me joy in my job has been connecting with other peers and learning how they approach localization. Because I think there’s as many localization strategies and programmes and team make-ups as there are in enterprise organisations.

 

I’ve always thought it would be interesting, I’ve never worked on the vendor side, and I’ve always thought how interesting that would be to have exposure to all these different ways of working. And so, I think that would be interesting from someone who has never worked on the vendor side. And the value you bring from being on the client side is having a solid understanding of how enterprises work and some of the challenges and struggles that a localization manager or professional would have within an enterprise. And being able, that will allow you on the vendor side to really empathize with your clients and be able to proactively provide good service for them because you understand what it’s like. And you can anticipate their needs often before they even see them. So, I see huge benefit both professionally for yourself and also adding value to the vendor and the clients of the vendor.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Paula, as we reach the end of this interview, what is your advice for localization professionals and enterprises today? What should they be doing to in a way future-proof their careers and be prepared for the next shift in the evolution of their localization services jobs and careers and work that they’re doing?

 

Paula Hunter

Yeah, so summary of a lot of the topics I’ve touched on. Be curious, be self-aware, know what you like, know what you are passionate about, and then carve your own path by following your passions and identifying gaps or inefficiencies within your organization. I think there’s so much low hanging fruit in most organizations that people don’t see all working in their own areas, and we have that opportunity.

 

Think outside the building by staying plugged into industry updates, connect with your peers in the localization industry on a regular basis, help them solve problems and reach out to ask them to help you.

 

Partner with your stakeholders and by stakeholders, I mean the marketers, the developers, the UI UX, the accounting team, the procurement team, and be curious and learn about how they operate and just keep looking for ways to improve the way your business works by using that unique perspective.

 

I like to advise people when you’re pitching business cases as you’re carving your own path and creating these opportunities, make it easy for people to say yes. Connect and communicate and look for opportunities to help others because you will always learn something new.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

What a fascinating and fun conversation on such an important topic. I’m glad we covered the different journeys and paths that localization can take you and there will be a lot more to talk about that in the future. Paula, I think as a new and emerging field, localization present so many opportunities and you’ve touched upon so many of them today. We need to have this dialogue in the future, and I can’t wait to speak with you again on the subject and other areas of your expertise, of course. With that, Paula, let me thank you for your time and sharing your thoughts today.

 

Paula Hunter

Thank you so much, Sultan.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Okay, it’s time for my roundup of the interview and my analysis as to what has been discussed. As you heard, localization is a powerful field which enables people working in this industry to learn so many skills and build knowledge about diverse areas of business. Paula has so eloquently described how you could retool your skills and upon your exit add value to other areas of business. I think localization is a great area to be in, at the heart of everything in the enterprise and we are lucky that it helps us build connections with so many different areas of the enterprise. If you’re passionate about technology, localization helps you build relationships in that area and you get to learn how the technology puzzle fits together in your organization. Regardless of your enterprise structure, you get to learn about everything from customer experience to sales to product development and much more. As a localization manager, you don’t have to think too much about your next career option. You can easily fit into your preferred role by simply aligning your skills.

 

That brings us to the end of this episode. As usual, let me thank you, the listeners of this podcast, for listening, providing feedback, and making this forum stand out from the rest.  It is for you, and you must participate in order to receive the best quality information about our industry in an unbiased and uncensored way. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or your platform of choice and give this episode a 5-star rating. Until next time.

 

Outro

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