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Education and the localization industry

posted 2007-05-28 10:01:52
by Peter Reynolds

Last week I got an unsolicited email from a student who was studying for an MSc in Scientific, Medical and Technical Translation with Translation Technology at Imperial College London. She was writing to people within the localization industry as part of her research. It is her intention that she would localize Foreign Desk in Argentinean Spanish as part of her dissertation. Foreign Desk is a tool which was originally developed by Lionbridge to manage localization projects and they released it as open source on SourceForge . As far as I know there has very little new code written for it since 2002.

I have received other mails from time to time from students looking to research some aspect of localization and others I know within the industry have often received the same emails. I mention all this to show how education within our industry has changed in recent years. Translators have always been very well educated but in recent years we are seeing much better courses being offered to people involved in the technical or management aspects of our industry.

A few weeks ago we had our WorldSummit 2007 conference in San Diego. Among the speakers were Alan Melby from  Brigham Young University, Nitish Singh from California State University, Chico and Kieran Dunne from Kent State University. Reinhard Schaler form the University of Limerick addressed our first WorldSummit Europe conference in Dublin last December. These people and their colleagues in other Universities are putting together courses which deal with different aspect of localization management and technology. A lot of the research into topics such as Machine Translation is taking place in the post graduate courses of the Universities.

It is my opinion that this is a very positive development. It will lead to a more skill and confident generation of professionals within our industry. It is really great to see people who have graduated with good degrees decide to study course that will lead them to our industry.

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