Localization, training, and instrumentalization

ANTHONY PYM
Intercultural Studies Group
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain

Discourses on the cross-cultural rendering of software and websites now

huddle around one of the major communication sectors of our time, known
by the semi-misnomer “localization”. However, the key concepts of the
localization industry tend not to concern translation, which is often
marginalized as a non-communicative phrase-replacement activity. This
poses serious problems for the training institutions that would want to
prepare translators to enter the industry. In the absence of any stable
“localization competence” that might be mapped straight onto a study
program, our training institutions must take steps to convey competence in
the basic technologies and to develop links with the localization industry.
Such links are partly strained by the very different ways in which industry
and the academy convert knowledge into economic capital, and thus by the
ways in which they build social networks. For sociological reasons,
relations between the academy and the localization industry have not been
easy. At the same time, this disjuncture should allow training institutions to
offer a critical view of localization discourses and technologies,
particularly of those that turn cross-cultural communication into phrase-
replacement exercises. Rather than supply cheap labor for industry,
intelligent training should intervene in the future of localization itself.
Keywords: localization, technology, training, translation

What “localization” means here

I use the term “localization” to refer to a general set of discourses informing

cross-cultural text production and adaptation in the fields of software, product
documentation, web technology, and some international news services. We
find these discourses within what is sometimes also known as the
“globalization, internationalization, localization and translation industries”
(GILT for short), but the names change each year.
Although those four long “–ion” terms are all somehow necessary to
describe what those industries do, or what kind of communication they are
From Translation Research Projects 5, eds. Esther Torres-Simon and David Orrego-Carmona,
Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group, 2014. pp. 37-50.
[Link]
38 Anthony Pym

engaged in, the four are rarely used together, and the acronym GILT has not
really caught on (perhaps due to some kind of well-deserved guilt). In the
place of those four terms, we usually find the one word “localization”, which
at least has the serious virtues of not being an acronym and not being too long,
especially when reduced to the form “L10N”. The term definitely comes from
the industry, rather than from esoteric theory or any felt needs of training
institutions – the sad truth is that academic theory has had no historical effect
on industry practices in this field, which have been happily theorizing without
us. So the term “localization” has leaped out from places where money is
made, jobs are created, and academia is at bay. That might be enough reason
for my interest in it. But can the one term really represent the whole complex
of interrelated communication processes (the thing that GILT was supposed to
cover)? Can the part really stand for the whole? If not, what price do we pay
for this convenient reduction? What is it covering over?
Standard definitions of “localization” usually come accompanied with
definitions of the terms associated with it (the ones sharing the space of the
GILT industries). Here, for example, are those offered by the Education
Initiative Taskforce of the now-defunct Localization Industry Standards
Association (LISA) (Fry 2003):

- Localization involves taking a product and making it linguistically

and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and
language) where it will be used and sold.

- Internationalization is the process of generalizing a product so that it

can handle multiple languages and cultural conventions without the
need for re-design. Internationalization takes place at the level of
program design and document development.

- Globalization addresses the business issues associated with taking a

product global. In the globalization of high-tech products this involves
integrating localization throughout a company, after proper
internationalization and product design, as well as marketing, sales,
and support in the world market.

We might say that there is one general process called “globalization”

(here understood at the level of the individual company), of which
“internationalization” and “localization” are parts. In order to globalize, you
first make your product in some way general (“internationalization”), then you
adapt (“localize”) it to specific target markets (“locales”). The terms are by no
means as standard as they may appear (Microsoft uses them very differently,
especially for degrees of internationalization). Yet they encapsulate a whole
logical process, a coherent view of the ways in which cross-cultural marketing
Localization, training, and instrumentalization 39

can be carried out in an age of information technology and international

capitalism. Together, the terms can form a whole. If the one term
“localization” should simply represent that whole, it might be a matter of mere
convention, and little more need be said. Yet things are not quite that simple.
For example, I have described this whole as a “process of communication”,
but exactly who is communicating with whom through a localized product?
What are the effects of the massive amounts of technology that stand between
any sender (perhaps now a “developer”) and any receiver (now a profiled
“user”)? And then, more worryingly, what is the precise role of “translation”
within this wider whole? The term “translation” is indeed part of the GILT
tetra; but it has no place alongside the reductions L10N or i18N (for
“internationalization”). No one talks about “T09N”. Translation is definitely
not cool enough for a neologism.
I suggest that these simple questions, if pursued, reveal that the whole
known as “localization” is far more fragmentary and problematic than it might
first appear.
Many of its visions are in fact of no more than parts.

What localization is not

If this coherent set of communication processes exists, then the term

“localization” should obviously not be reduced to a mode of translation
constrained only by the norms of target-culture usage. That could be a correct
reading of the phrase “make [the product] linguistically and culturally
appropriate”, which we might otherwise term “adaptation” or perhaps
“re-marketing” (on a par with Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make it new” in the field
of poetry translation). The notion of adaptation is certainly present as a
communicative ideal. One does frequently hear localization professionals state
that the end user of the software, website or product documentation should be
able to interact with the product in a “completely natural” way, as if the
product had been developed from within the target locale. However, the
economic workings of the industry are very far from such ideals. In the
interests of efficiency, the communication process also involves significant
internationalization, the production of a neutral, generic product, apparently
culture-free (in fact belonging to the technical culture of the localization
industry itself). Internationalization then allows for numerous modes of
semi-automatic translation and multilingual content management. Those
technologies in turn tend to incur constraints that are far more powerful than
any ideals of pristine end-user locales, apparently unaware of where the
products come from. And those constraints almost invariably ensure that the
resulting language is anything but adapted or “linguistically and culturally
appropriate”. In sum, the ideology of localization as naturalization is a sham, a
subterfuge, camouflage. The key to localization processes is inter-
40 Anthony Pym

nationalization, the initial production of the generic, and not adaptation. If you
doubt it, just ask why we all still put up with the phrase “1 files left to
download”, in many languages.
As a consequence of this wider context, the use of the term “localization”
to denote just one part of the whole is bound to be misleading, and not just
randomly so. And yet that is precisely the term that is being showcased in our
training institutions, and in ways that are even more sham-ridden and
camouflaging than is the case in industry. Classes in “localization” mostly turn
out to be on translation technologies. Are such things needed? Of course.
Should they be called “localization”? I have no idea why. A course in
translation memories should be a course in translation memories. A course on
how to create and translate websites does not necessarily deal with
localization. A course in “how to write for translation” (i.e. how to produce
texts that are going to be translated into many languages) has a lot to do with
internationalization, but is certainly not teaching the whole of localization. A
course on comparative cultural behavior, using the paradigms of Hofstede and
the like, might reflect some of the naïve ideals of theory but is certainly not to
be confused with the realities of the localization industry. Further, courses in
terminology management or content management convey very useful
software-application skills but do not necessarily have anything to do with
localization. And even courses in project management, of the kind much
needed by the industry, ultimately involve basic business management skills;
they need not have anything in particular to do with localization itself. All
those things are parts of localization processes since they all involve skills that
are in demand in parts of the industry; none of them by itself can properly be
labeled a course on “localization”.
When our training institutions, at least in Europe, offer courses and
programs in “localization”, they are using a fashionable term to suggest that
their teaching is somehow in tune with developments in the industry. More
often than not, the institutions are repackaging traditional skills under
deceptively new labels. In so doing, they offer no more than fragments of what
should be seen as a wider, more complex and problematic whole.
Hence a first threat of fragmentation: Our training institutions cannot see,
and in some cases not even name, the professional whole. It follows that they
will train students to work in the galleys or mastheads of industry, without
being able to ask where the ship is headed.

Is there a localization competence?

Of course, this use of the term “localization” within our institutions could be a
simple fact of academic marketing, which has no need to be judged in terms of
right or wrong (student enrollments and job placements are more significant
measures). Further, the fragmentary nature of training courses is perhaps not
Localization, training, and instrumentalization 41

entirely a misrepresentation; it may reflect something deeper within the

localization processes themselves, and indeed within the localization industry.
Let me probe this possibility with a question: We may freely admit that
our training institutions can convey numerous skills that are in demand within
the localization industry, but do those skills add up to anything like a unitary
“localization competence”?
It is easy enough to recognize a “translation competence”, and to break
that down into aptitudes, skills and knowledge that a translator should have in
order to be a competent translator. An institution can then use that model in
order to set about training translators, occupying as many years as it wants to
inscribe in the competence. The same could be said of the various kinds of
interpreters, whose professions correspond to different varieties of interpreting
competence. But how can we think in those terms with respect to localization?
Who or what is a competent localizer? Impossible to say—localization is
carried out by teams.
When you ask that kind of question, you quickly discover that the
localization industry is not configured in the same way as the traditional
markets for translators and interpreters. Its training needs cannot be
approached in the same way. If localization is a competence, it is certainly not
one in the same way as translation and interpreting are.

Divisions of labor

Localization processes certainly do exist, at least as logical steps that a product

has to go through in order to be localized successfully. Here, for example, is a
basic process model for the localization of software (here adapted from
Esselink’s 2000 textbook):

Analysis of Received Material

Scheduling and Budgeting
Glossary Translation or Terminology Setup
Preparation of Localization Kit (materials for the translators)
Translation of Software
Translation of Help and Documentation
Processing Updates
Testing of Software
Testing of Help and Publishing of Documentation
Product QA and Delivery
Post-mortem with Client

There is a certain competence involved in getting all those things to

happen in a timely and coordinated way (or better, controlling the chaos when
they all happen together). That skill set is called “project management”, and it
42 Anthony Pym

is useful for any kind of work that involves teams and projects. (Note, in
passing, that localization can also involve long-term maintenance or up-dating
programs as well as projects, for example in the case of multilingual websites.)
Within this process, there is work for people competent in terminology,
revising, testing, software engineering, and yes, translation. But all those
things are usually done by different people. There is no one person there who
acts as an all-round “localizer”. In its very nature, the localization project
requires a significant division of labor. And it is in this structural and very
necessary division that we might locate the underlying reason for the
fragmentary visions of the process as a whole.
Some might object that project managers do indeed see the whole, and
that their competence should properly be described as “localization”. And yet,
do project managers generally see what happens in the reception of the
product, or in the rendition of all the languages? Managers often have to
coordinate work into languages they do not know. Do they consistently see
anything beyond times and quantities? Do they have time to do so? Is that their
responsibility? There are many variables involved, and the project management
we most like in theory will certainly require all the visions we can muster,
especially those involving translation. But one must seriously doubt whether
project managers really require, in the eyes of the industry, competencies other
than those associated with good business and organizational skills.
One must then doubt the industrial virtues of anything like a localization
competence. What industry requires, and what various training institutions can
supply, are sets of skills and aptitudes, some of which may involve translation,
and all of which require workers able to follow orders.

The role of translation

This brings us to the role of translation. As can be seen in the above process
model, translation is commonly seen as part of the localization process. It is
just one in a series of steps, and it is probably not the most important step
(internationalization is the real revolution, and bad scheduling or a lack of
testing can cost more heads than a bad translation). This state of affairs tends
to upset translation theorists, whose maximum concession is to see
localization as a special case of translation. The result is at best a dialogue of
the deaf.
From the perspective of training, we might partly resolve the dilemma by
recognizing translation and localization as two aspects of cross-cultural
communication. Within this frame, localization brings in specific key elements
like internationalization and, as a consequence, considerable technological
mediation and teamwork. Translation, for its part, concerns multiple features
of interlingual processes that are overlooked in most models of localization. It,
too, has its specificity.
Localization, training, and instrumentalization 43

This way of approaching the two terms also has its geopolitical
dimension. As is well known, most localization projects go from English into
other languages. The labor requirements in English-speaking centers are thus
likely to be quite different from those found in projects into more peripheral
languages. We should not be surprised to find the United States offering many
programs in technical writing (including how to write texts that are to be
translated), whereas Europe invests considerably more institutional effort in
training translators as such. One might also venture the general impression
(awaiting some kind of empirical verification) that many project managers in
the US come from business backgrounds, whereas many project managers in
Europe have been trained as translators or come from backgrounds that
concern languages. The producing centers require the skills closest to
internationalization. The actual adaptation processes require the services of
translators.
This is by no means a neat balancing act. The division of labor commonly
involves reducing translation to a basic phrase-replacement process. There are
several reasons for this. Translation-memory and machine-translation programs
break texts into phrase and sentence units, inviting translators not to alter the
renditions already in the database. The mind of the translator is consequently
moved from the level of text and communication to that of phrase and formal
equivalence. Alternatively, much translation work is outsourced to freelancers
in the form of Excel files and the like, along with specific glossaries but rarely
with indication of context. All the translator has to do is render the text at
phrase level, respecting the glossary. Translators are often not trusted to do
anything more spectacular. And rightly so: most of them have no specific
training in the fields being localized, and they have only a vague awareness of
what the entire localization process involves. If any special aptitude is required
here, it might be capacity to put up with prolonged donkeywork.
That is one scenario. It embodies the fundamental paradox of localization.
The communicative frame that superficially promises complete adaptation to a
new locale threatens to reduce its lingual component to precisely the opposite.
Translation becomes the phrase-level replacement exercise it was thought to
be in the 1960s and 1970s, in the days of the linguistic equivalence paradigm.
Since then, some thirty years of translation theories have increasingly seen
adaptation as a legitimate part of the translator’s activity. The process of
localization would want to take that progress and place it in the hands of its
marketing experts and desktop publishers. Translators are turned back to the
basics.
There is an alternative scenario. Some localization companies (and some
of their clients) are reported to appreciate that bad translations result in bad
localization projects, with economic consequences at the point of the end-user.
They are also aware that experienced translators have cultural skills that can
help in the marketing of products in new locales. The established concept of
44 Anthony Pym

translation as phrase-replacement is thus undergoing some revision. Yet I am

unable to say to what extent this is happening, nor to what actual effect.

The role of training institutions

How might these competing scenarios be addressed within a training

institution? Here are a few suggestions:

- First, students should be warned about the kind of donkeywork jobs

being created in the localization industry. They should be advised to
work their way, as soon as possible, into the more creative (and
probably more lucrative) positions available. Even better, they should
receive the added management skills needed to have them start
somewhere in the environs of project management.
- Second, some means should be found to develop lines of
communication with the industry, in such a way that the competencies
of professional translators might become a source of shared benefits.
This is happening as the odd localization professional is employed in a
training institution, presumably indifferent to the salary drop. There is
also a handful of academics seriously interested in discovering what is
happening in the localization industry. But they are only a handful,
unfortunately surrounded by crews of cultural theorists who are sure
they know where everything is headed.
- Third, teamwork and project management should become parts of our
training in technical translation and translation technologies. This
should happen throughout the entirety of our programs, both within
translation courses and in projects involving other faculties (law,
engineering, informatics, etc.). Through the various modalities of
inter-professional teamwork, our students should become aware of the
range of services they can provide, avoiding any illusion that there is
only one eternal kind of professional translator. In our own age,
translators are called upon to do other tasks in addition to translating:
documentation, terminology, rewriting, and especially post-editing.
There is also a wide range of professionals who have to learn how to
interact with experts in cross-cultural communication.
- Fourth, those training institutions that also incorporate research
programs (usually at PhD level) should be seeking research contracts
with the localization industry. This has been done most spectacularly
by the CNGL Centre for Global Intelligent Content in Ireland, on a
long-term basis by relations between SAP and several translator-
training institutions in Germany, to cite two examples because I am
aware of no others. As a general rule, research cooperation between
Localization, training, and instrumentalization 45

industry and the academy has been very scant, sometimes reduced to
the use of students for the testing of products.

Industry vs. academics

An earlier version of this paper, written in 2006, was very pessimistic about
possible relations between academics and the localization industry. Let me list
the reasons for that pessimism, before moving to the more optimistic outlook
that I have now in 2014.
First, academics tend not to take the localization industry seriously
because they, the academics, have established themselves in apparently stable
professional fields (technical translation, literary translation, conference
interpreting) and see no reason to change. The new kid on the block seems to
offer no more than hype and money, without the humanistic discourses still
treasured by ageing teachers (“translation helps create dialogue and peace
among the peoples of the earth”, and so on).
Second, localization experts mistrust academics because they think that
they, the academics, know nothing about the industry, or about any real-world
industry for that matter. And often they are quite right.
Third, in keeping with the above, there are strange cultural differences.
Localization experts use very smart cell phones; academics use email.
Localization research is published as PowerPoints; academics write long
meandering articles. Localization people smile all the time (happiness
indicates success, which brings new business); academics look permanently
distressed (our role is to be critical of the present world, knowledgeable about
better things, and thus professionally discontent). Localization discourse
attributes values to large impressionistic numbers, percentages of growth, the
latest advance, and a revolution a week; when academics occasionally do the
same, it is not uncommonly with a tinge of self-irony. Localization partners
get rich or go bust; academics wallow in middling financial comfort.
Localization gurus are ranked by how much they sold their last company for;
academics have ranks that date back to the late Middle Ages, and we still keep
the funny hats and gowns, waiting in closets for the occasional days when we
show that we are speaking from another place, with other values.
Fourth, and no doubt less anecdotic, the localization industry has done
much to create its own social field (in Bourdieu’s sense), and part of this
creation is the production of its own modes of training. Localization
professionals do not simply lament that translation schools fail to produce
good employees; they have developed training programs themselves. Thus we
find courses offered by a “Localization Institute”1 in the United States, the
Institute of Localisation Professionals2 in Ireland, and a search for web pages
called “Localis/zation 101” gives about 4,000 hits – there are a lot of would-be
industry trainers out there! In the web pages of the Localization Institute you
46 Anthony Pym

can currently find online tutorials in things like “Game Culturalization”, at a

cost of US$200 per session. The 12-week self-study course in Localization
Project Management costs US$600, plus US$1,450 if you sign up for the
certification seminar. The client is implicitly invited to take on small online
lessons, then go for bigger ones if they work. In sum, these services have
adopted the money-for-knowledge practices of the Peripatetics (except that
Socrates purportedly only asked for money after the lesson, if the student
thought they had learned anything). All this happens while industry experts
insist that the academic institutions thus imitated are of little practical value.
The industry is doing the training, but in a very direct and financially oriented
way.
Fifth, localization seminars and conferences suggest similar differences
with respect to academic norms. The man in suspenders wants several hundred
dollars from each participant in his seminars on internationalization; some
company directors pay this, not because the expert necessarily knows more
than them, but because he will be a kind of football coach, a motivation man,
for the company’s employees. He is a good investment. As for the actual
conferences, they can cost participants some US$700 a day, and are spatially
designed so that the full fee will get you to the inner circle of knowledge
(people speaking and showing), whereas a reduced fee will allow you into the
outer fringe of the “demonstration area”. The only free knowledge is website
hype. Such is industry. Knowledge has market value if it is expensive
(Bourdieu might talk about the immediate inter-convertibility of cultural and
economic capital), at the same time as high fees keep the riff-raff out and
enable organizers to offer reductions to the people they like (for Bourdieu,
they restrict the circulation of social capital—the people you know and
exchange favors with). The economic is swiftly converted into knowledge and
networks.
Academic seminars and conferences tend not to operate like that. In
Europe, at least, we are quite good at converting cultural capital (knowledge)
into symbolic capital (titles and degrees), without any quick conversion into
economic capital (money). The localization industry can then only imitate the
symbolic capital, and disdain the rest. Thanks to this fundamental difference,
our social capital (the people we meet and know) tends not to include
representatives of the localization industry, and their social capital certainly
does not include us. Hence the two worlds.
However, as I have said, things have changed over the past ten years or
so. In 2006, the Education Initiative Taskforce of the Localization Industries
Standards Association (LISA) had seven university members, which was
respectable enough, albeit just a fraction of the more than 500 translator-
training institutions in the world.3 Then LISA disappeared, apparently
bankrupt. Its functions have been taken over by organizations including the
Globalization and Localization Association (GALA4), and the Translation
Automation User Society (TAUS5), which are doing real work on the
Localization, training, and instrumentalization 47

institutional relations and tools of the industry, and which seem remarkably
more open to discussions with academics. Representatives of entities like the
European Language Industry Association (ELIA6), the European Union of
Associations of Translation Companies (EUATC7) and the Globalization and
Localization Association (GALA8) are occasionally invited speakers at
academic conferences, and academics sporadically appear at the industry
meetings. Along the way, at least to judge from the names of the organizations
in Europe, the term “localization” is gradually being absorbed into
superordinates like “language industry”, “translation companies”, or even,
sometimes, “translation”.
Perhaps the most spectacular move in recent years has come from where
one might least have expected it: the European Commission’s Directorate
General for Translation (DGT). This has involved two main initiatives. First,
the DGT has commissioned a series of reports on issues such as the size of the
language industry in Europe, the role of English as a lingua franca, the use of
intercomprehension (bilingual conversations), the status of translators, and so
on.9 It has been interested in discovering how the language industry works in
Europe as a whole, and not just within its own corridors. Second, the same
DGT has launched the European Masters in Translation (EMT10), which
regularly includes industry representatives at its meetings and has spawned the
research projects of Optimale, which has set out to gather data on what the
industry expects of trainers. At last! So what does the industry say? What do
you expect them to say, when they don’t know who is listening in: accuracy is
the foremost requirement (as reported in Optimale research), the ability to
follow the rules, apply the glossary, and get the right expression. Did you
expect them to admit that speed and variable qualities are what constitute their
bottom line? In sum, dialogue and self-report data might get us part of the way
to mutual understanding, but not all the way.
One last mode of contact between industry and academics is through
having doctoral students carry out research in industry or with the help of
industry. Translation is perhaps one of the few areas of the humanities where
this is very feasible: doctoral research is paid for by Microsoft, for example,
and I have come across doctoral students who were doing their translation
research for BMW, and others for an Italian manufacturer of kitchens (why
not?). Over the past few years I have been involved in a European Union
Marie Curie project designed to place four doctoral researchers within
companies, in both the private and public sectors, for short well-paid-for
stays.11 In the part of that experience that has directly concerned localization
companies, the job placements have been anything but easy (see the reports in
Pym et al. 2014). The companies all respond positively at first, since any costs
will be covered, there is some prestige to be gained, and the researcher might
even discover something really useful. But then comes the negotiation phase:
exactly what will the researcher do?, what is it possible to do?, how much will
48 Anthony Pym

this get in the way?, then the killer, given that all real-world projects are for
real-world clients, how do we allow the researcher access to confidential
texts? We have mostly only been able to arrange research stays in situations
where there were prior contacts between the people involved, either through
the researcher having worked as a translator at the company concerned or with
the people at the company, or a company researcher having reached out and
placed one foot in academia (a prime example being Fred Hollowood formerly
from Symantec, with his involvement in the CNGL Centre for Global
Intelligent Content). Despite all the rationalist models where aims and
backgrounds dovetail perfectly, cooperation between industry and academics
still requires strong personal ties.

Training beyond industry

When industry and the academy cooperate, they can do so very well, bringing
different insights that genuinely help open new horizons on both sides. The
underlying question, though, concerns the prime aim of the cooperation, which
tends to fall more one side than the other. The easy assumption is that we are
both in the business of perfecting training programs: industry representatives
thus tell academics what kind of skilled people they need, and academics
happily supply the required products. That very simplistic assumption might
work well enough for the online PowerPoints in the industry’s multiplying
“Localization 101” courses, but it is not likely to take us very far with respect
to universities.
That is one reason why I have included research in the above discussion:
we academics can indeed provide industry with some of the numbers, and
perhaps the odd idea that they can use, but with that insistence on research,
which need not be entirely dissociated from training, comes a malignant
resistance to servitude. Academic researchers traditionally inherit an ethics
that encourages free, disinterested inquiry, with data and results available to
all. Some of us actively embrace that millennial ethos, along with the
mediocre salaries it may entail. The questions we ask are our questions; and
the answers are for all. There is rarely any thought of us providing numbers
that directly drive the profits of any one company, or of hiding results in the
name of confidentiality or financial secrets. To be sure, the actual conflicts
over such matters may be few and far between. Yet the division is there, and is
even cemented into place by a certain amount of mutual respect. For the most
part, there are situations of reasoned exchange between professions: academics
produce knowledge that may be of use; industry provides the data needed for
the knowledge, which will hopefully be of use to them. All that seems fair
enough, at least as far as research is concerned.
But training? Surely our aim is to ensure employment for our students?
Yes and no. We lost the division between polytechnics and universities, and
Localization, training, and instrumentalization 49

thereby our capacity to feign indifference to employment. But this does not
mean that we have succumbed to producing users of technology, followers of
guidelines, meeters of deadlines, reliable and invisible bearers of meaning
from language to language. If such creatures exist, they have little need of
much that we can teach. Far better, I suggest, at least with respect to the people
who might indeed learn from us, to provide all those serious virtues along with
something else, something along the lines of a critical capacity to think
beyond the needs of industry, albeit from within it. For example, instead of
applying dehumanized rules, our students might occasionally ask about who is
communicating with whom, to what end, and to what common improvable
purpose. This does not mean simple resistance – the charge of
“dehumanization” is not necessarily a complaint about technological progress,
since much of the more recent progress is precisely in highly humanizing
social media. But it does mean producing graduates with a capacity to think
for themselves, and to seek their own way through the labyrinths.

To summarize

The sliding of the loose terms should indicate that there is no such thing as a
“translation industry”, in the singular. There are only conjunctural industry
demands and complaints, which are met well or badly at certain points in
history, according to the varying capacities of each partner in the exchange.
The really strange thing is that some of our training institutions fail to see this;
they act as if we really were all in the same boat, rowing against the same
winds, seeking the same port. There is no surer way, I suggest, to have the
boat sink, losing benefits for all concerned.
The prime role of our training institutions should not be to provide
immediate industry needs. We should not suddenly be adjusting all our
courses to fill the labor gaps that open momentarily. We should, however, be
able to train people for long, adventurous and multi-faceted careers, for the
long-term well-being of both the graduate and the industry itself.
This means two things. First, we must be teaching the basic technical
competence that will save the localization industry from exploiting public
ignorance (none of our students should be paying for an introductory
PowerPoint presentation of Trados—they should be quite good at finding all
the technical information they want on the web and in discussion groups). We
ignore technology at our peril; we must be there; we must teach students how
to find it, learn it quickly, and move to the next release, all for free. Second,
and far more important, we should be able to edge our graduates toward a
critical vue d’ensemble, an overview of what cross-cultural communication is,
of how it is being affected by technology, and of how far the current practices
of the localization industry privilege numbers more than communication. And
50 Anthony Pym

both those things should be done at the same time, if enough disaffected
localizers and technocratic academics can be found.
In a word, our students should be able to work not just within the
localization industry, but also beyond it. With luck, they might one day be able
to communicate, rather than replace internationalized phrases.

References

Esselink, Bert. 2000. A Practical Guide to Localization. Amsterdam &

Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fry, Deborah. 2001. The Localization Primer. Revised version.
[Link] Visited April
2003.
Pym, Anthony, et al. 2014. “Work placements in doctoral research training in
the humanities: Eight cases from Translation Studies”. Across 15(1): 1-
23.

Notes
1
[Link]
2
[Link]
3
See the list of translator-training institutions at [Link]
4
[Link]
5
[Link]
6
[Link]
7
[Link]
8
[Link]
9
See [Link]
10
[Link]
11
[Link]