In June, LISA announced a new initiative to develop a promotional program for the academic communities in Europe, North America and Asia. The move is designed to stimulate more formal education in skills beneficial to the localization industry, and hence to help remedy the massive labor shortage currently restricting industry growth. “As localization gains in strategic importance, one of the main challenges facing our members is finding and keeping qualified staff,” according to LISA Director Michael Anobile.

“The relative youth of the industry means that localization is not yet taught in many institutions. Many related disciplines only cover part of the picture, while localization is characterized by a blend of linguistic, technical and business skills. As an industry association with good links to the academic world, we are in a unique position to serve both our members and the community at large by ensuring that new staff have the qualifications they need.”

LEIT Phase I is taking the form of a survey of existing courses in order to identify needed course development. Other deliverables include a list of recommendations and the estimated budget required for further work. “The first step in the ground-breaking LEIT project is to document the current state of affairs in order to avoid reinventing the wheel and to help members in the short term. Considerable care has been taken to ensure that the planned survey of courses is comprehensive and covers all aspects of interest to the localization industry,” says Professor Maghi King of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, one academic group involved in Phase I.

“One of our first acts was to develop and refine a matrix to cover all aspects of the localization industry, from translation and technical writing through globalization (enabling), internationalization and localization. The result will be the first global review of courses relevant to localization,” she continued. The list of courses will be posted on the LISA Web site and will aid members in choosing staff in the short term, until LISA-accredited courseware is selected or developed.

An inner circle of leading academic institutions currently including the University of Geneva, Brigham Young University, Kent State University, the University of Applied Science in Cologne, City College of Dublin, The Monterey Institute of International Studies and the National Software Center in Bombay has been entrusted with the job of producing first drafts of the various project deliverables, which will then be subject to review by their peers and members of the LISA community. The preliminary results for Phase I will be presented at LISA’s General Assembly meeting in Madrid on August 26.

The survey is focusing on multiple levels of training activity: internationalization courses for program developers, localization and adaptation curricula for translators, and globalization-oriented courses for international business majors. Initial results reveal the presence of some training programs at the university level, particularly in the localization area, but there is also a marked trend in favor of extracurricular, industrial-style continuing education seminars on the inter-nationalization side.

Other activities being documented include in-house training for developers and for localization specialists. Says Alpnet’s Bert Esselink: “At Alpnet we provide new localization specialists and engineers with basic training during the first weeks of their employment. After that they specialize in one or two clients that they are assigned to, but since localization projects are so diverse, there’s a lot of cross-training involved. Localization engineers should not just know about software, but should also get working experience with online help formats, translation memory tools, graphics editing, and basic desktop publishing.”

At the university level, there seems to be more focused effort to introduce new courses for localizers in translation programs than to make changes in computer science curricula. CMU/ University of Pittsburgh adjunct Dieter Waeltermann notes: “Typically, computer science departments are faced with numerous difficulties in any attempt to add new courses to their existing rigorous curricula. Besides, if students are almost guaranteed good jobs on graduation and companies are not overtly demanding internationalization skills, there's no incentive for programs to offer such courses or for students to bother taking them.”

Ensuring that new hires have adequate training and experience is nonetheless essential in a fast-paced industry. “I’d like to be able to bring in interns for six months or take new hires for a year’s probationary period during which they could have the opportunity to learn our software in-depth, but the business is moving too fast for that,” says TRADOS’ Helene Wirkus. “This means that I have to find fully qualified people who have already worked with our products so that they can step right into product support positions.”

The demand for thorough preparation on the part of graduating translators and potential localizers is a tough requirement to meet. Existing programs leave little room to fit in new courses without sacrificing important existing skills requirements. Keeping up with the wide range of software options available in the marketplace can be financially daunting for academic budgets. Kent State’s Greg Shreve points out, “We work with very tight discretionary budgets that prevent us from paying market price for the wide range of program packages our students need to do their work. And yet our students are the cheapest, most effective investment in client education that the vendors have going for them. These people go out into the marketplace and immediately demand that employers provide them with the software so they can do their work.” The Monterey Institute’s Diane DeTerra seconds this comment, “What we need are active cooperative partnerships between industry and academia in order to meet our common goals.”

Ours is not the only industry that faces ongoing change and a need to modify curriculum on the fly in order to deliver just-in-time training to state-of-the-art future industry experts. Long-term relationships such as those between Goodyear and the KSU School of Business or Anheuser-Bush and Washington University in St. Louis represent models for the synergy that can exist between academia and the commercial sector. These cooperative relationships provide for leading-edge teaching and research, personnel development and technological innovation.

In contrast to this kind of dynamic interaction, the language industry has been characterized by mutual misunderstandings and lack of cooperative programs. The time has come for the producers of information and language products to lend the kind of support that has come to be expected from the engineering sector, for instance. It is also time for academia to recognize the importance of language and information engineering and to turn their curricular interests away from outmoded concentrations in areas where there is no market demand. There is a clear need to focus instead on skills acquisition strategies that will ensure their graduates lucrative positions in today’s and tomorrow’s job markets.

Phase II of the LISA Education Initiative will provide a more complete set of educational materials responsive to the rapidly developing needs of the language industries. This stage may take the form of creating a model featuring new courseware or disseminating existing resources. According to Professor Alan Melby of Brigham Young University in Utah, who has been instrumental in setting up the initiative, “the model solves one of the major problems affecting courseware: time to market. Normally in fast-moving disciplines, by the time a course is set up, it’s out of date. By working together with LISA in this way, we can ensure we are equipping our graduates for the real world.”

“Phase II of the project will be kicked off at the October 1998 language industry conference at Kent State University, USA,” says Professor Sue Ellen Wright, another inner circle member. “This will involve the evaluation of the existing courses, recommendations for the promotion or further development of existing courses, and the development and marketing of new courses or course components. The goal is to have initial courseware versions ready for the start of the 1999 academic year.” Here, too, the proposals produced by the inner group will be discussed by a much wider circle of other academics and industry practitioners to ensure completeness and relevance.

The continued success of the LEIT project depends on financial support from LISA in conjunction with the LISA 2000 effort. Different sectors of the industry may well respond differently to the call for support, depending on their perceived needs with regard to enhanced training issues. While some companies, generally smaller players in the market, are saddled with the burden of in-house training, others with the capability of offering high salaries and stock options enjoy the luxury of being able to hire away valuable workers after they have gained expertise in other positions in the industry.

Developers may require less special training and experience in interna-tionalization skills than translators require in mastering localization applications. Nevertheless, all stakeholders in the process stand to benefit from increased efficiency and accuracy in the localization effort. After all, any profits that are to be made come from end users who purchase localized products, and the future market share of virtually every vendor depends on the holistic coordination of the localization effort.

A questionnaire on currently available courseware can be accessed at the LISA Web site, http://www.lisa.unige.ch. If you would like to become involved in the initiative, or would like further information on LISA events, services and membership application forms, please contact LISA Administration (7 route du Monastère, CH-1173, Féchy, Switzerland, Tel.: +41-21-821-3210, Fax: +41-21-821-3219, E-mail:lisa@lisa.org).

The Kent State University conference Language in Business / Language as Business (October 8-10) was originally planned with an emphasis on general language engineering concerns and a stated objective of gleaning information from industry on market-oriented needs for language professionals in the upcoming decade. The current format retains this base, overlaid with a serious focus on the needs of the localization industry. In addition to invited conference speakers, the event is open to a limited number of participants who wish to familiarize themselves with the needs of the industry and to participate in shaping the form and content of future courseware that will be offered through LEIT. Full program and registration information is available at http://appling.kent.edu/ialconf.htm. Individuals interested in registering for the conference can do so online via the Website.

The Kent conference runs parallel to this year’s SLIG conference in Dublin (October 8-9). LEIT is coordinating its efforts with SLIG and with the LETRAC group (Language Engineering for Translator Curricula) within the framework of the EU Telematics and Language Engineering initiative. LETRAC's mandate is to investigate the requirements and changing working environments of prospective employers of translators in both the private and public sectors in order to determine qualification requirements from an industry point of view. This will be used as a building block on which to develop standardized curricula modules which may be used throughout the translator and interpreter departments of European universities. Thus LETRAC is playing a role in Europe that is very similar to the objectives of LEIT on a broader, worldwide scale, but lacks the programming and general business orientation that is also a part of LEIT (for more information see: http://www. tagish.co.uk/ ethos/tap/tap/2e86_3a6.htm).

Prof. Sue Ellen Wright

Kent State University

Institute for Applied Linguistics
Kent, OH 44242
USA

Tel +1 330 673 0043
Fax +1 330 673 0738
E-mail: swright@kent.edu