A conclave of L10n thought leaders at the recent annual GALA gathering in Monte Carlo
Flying home from the GALA Conference (#galaconf) in Monte Carlo has brought some new insights and trends to the surface for me. (It’s a long “flight” due to 5 hour delay leaving Nice which snow-balled into 30 hours of end-to-end travel time, but who’s complaining?) This blog was written over the Atlantic on Thursday and uploaded into a blog via GoGo on DELTA (somewhere over the MidWest) on Friday.
We are all so accustomed to instant access to critical information and the ability to broadcast our opinions at any moment in time that 4.5 hours in a French airport with no WiFi and anemic mobile phone access can lead to an ephiphany. In short, 2 months away from the localization industry, followed by attendance at this most significant conference let me see a critical convergence of roles, workflows and tools that are affecting localization and traditional tech pubs publishing. The blog below shares some of my post conference impressions, that should prove relevant whether you are involved in localization/translation or not.
Our roles are changing, whether we like it or not
Jack Molisani and Scott Abel recently published an excellent and “right on” analysis in STC INTERCOMM (Tech Comm 2.0: Reinventing Our Relevance in the 2000s) of what it will take to “survive” in the shrinking “tech comm writer” market. Our natural instinct is to hang on to what we are used to and what we think we have been good at for years. But times are changing at such a pace that we can’t even consider hanging on to the old. Most of us don’t need to “reinvent” ourselves; we merely need to catalog all of the new skills and duties we’ve acquired over the past decade and “rebrand” our value for the benefit of management as well as customers. This is true in both localization and what we used to call technical communications. Continue reading…
