Act 2: Moving Pictures

It’s been three years with GenAI in our lives.

You may think we understand what AI can or cannot do (at least those in the Global North think they do). But think again. There are entire regions of the world that are playing catch-up to the AI-first reality. And there are always newcomers to our industry who need guidance to set them on the right path.

Ultimately, progress will look different to every team and professional. It won’t be linear, and it may come at a cost. It may require us to redefine ourselves. In our quest onward, no one should be left behind, right?

In this section, read the articles that explore the human side of the (r)evolution unfolding around us.

Jon Ritzdorf

Senior Manager of Globalization Content Infrastructure at Procore Technologies

Jon Ritzdorf is a seasoned language industry professional with over 20 years of experience in translation technology, solutions engineering, and globalization strategy. Since 2003, Jon has served as an adjunct professor in translation technology, localization, and language industry business practices at institutions including Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS), NYU, U. of Maryland, and U. of Chicago. Currently, Jon is Senior Manager of Globalization Content Infrastructure at Procore Technologies, leading Procore’s technical strategy for global expansion.

I have to wonder. If the last stage of CSA’s globalization maturity model is “Transparent” — where localization is no longer a function or department, just the way things are — aren’t we, the people who built the system, setting ourselves up for obsolescence? 

Think about it. “Transparent” describes a state where the localization team has done such a stellar job that systems, awareness, and mindsets are so attuned that they’ve made themselves redundant. Everyone knows how to write for a global audience. Products are designed with all the cultural permutations factored in from the start. The marketer instantly knows what won’t fly in Japan. The developer instinctively prepares the UI to be readable from right to left for Arabic-speaking countries. You know, the dream. 

So, where does that leave us, the localization professionals, the language enthusiasts?

There are two things that we have going for us, in my view:

1. There’s a long and winding road for companies to realize that dream state. Sometimes they even regress or fall into a loop of “two steps forward, one step back.” Until then, there’s plenty for us to do.
2. Everyone needs a plumber at some point. As unglamorous as this may sound, we, the localization professionals, are the plumbers of global business. No matter how much AI a company throws at solving a challenge, something somewhere will break, and they call the plumber to fix it.

This is the paradox of localization in the GenAI age. If our goal is to automate ourselves out of our jobs (and we seem to be hell-bent on this), the system is not designed to work without some level of expertise in plumbing. It just so happens we’re very good at quickly diagnosing and solving plumbing issues.

The “how” of localization is changing, but the “why” stays the same (and you need a plumber to understand the “why”)

I was recently asked the question, “What excites you?” Twenty years later, I‘m happy to report that I’m still excited about teaching. I just love passing on my knowledge to others.

Having done so for some time now, one thing I‘ve noticed is that the fundamentals of localization and internationalization (or the “why”) have remained unchanged between today and, say, the 1990s. Just because we have AI now and we can do things faster or more efficiently, doesn’t change the basics. It’s the “how” that is changing. 

The “how” we go about things may be changing, but the “why” — enabling and facilitating communication or allowing companies to sell — remains largely unchanged. The problem is that the “how” is  feeding our anxieties today and diverting us from the “why.”

People are rightly anxious about machines replacing them, and as machines improve, that anxiety is triggered even more. 

However, consider something else, the playbook for doing things globally is evolving as well. There are the fundamentals, sure: If you do this, you need to translate that (or not). If you translate, there are better options than spreadsheets. Then there are numerous permutations of companies with varying levels of maturity. Are they truly thinking globally, or is it all just aspiration? Are they open to adopting a global approach to current challenges, even if it creates issues or hogs resources? How will “going global” be prioritized? What’s the budget? Do they have the time or the personnel? 

Every team has a unique combination of these elements, and (spoiler alert) it still requires a human to make sense of it all and connect the objective with a process. Sure, you can throw the problem at the machine, but chances are you’ll end up going back to the human for cleanup or refitting (which neatly brings us back to our humble plumber analogy). The fact is, there is a reason truly global-minded companies have a localization team. Nobody gets as excited about doing this cleanup work as we language and technology nerds. We’re expert plumbers and we take pride in our jobs.

AI: a solution in search of a problem

I’m sure there will always be a need for people like us. We now have a wonderful toolbox called AI, and it’s a potential solution to many problems that required significantly more time and tooling before the 2020s: It can perform source rewrites, extract terminology, modify tone and register, and automate post-editing to some degree. 

Yet for all its prowess, the LLM sometimes still can’t manage things as basic as consistently preserving line breaks. The LLM is also not an “all-knowing” localization specialist that will tolerate and be understanding of your engineering team’s insistence on using improper ISO coding for internationalization. So what’s supposed to be a solution often just introduces a new set of complexities, unpredictable decision making, and it’s still me, the human, doing the cleanup, making hard decisions, and choosing trade-offs, just as I did back when I started 24 years ago in 2001.

In a way, interactions with the machine are not unlike an executive coming and saying, “Just get this translated” into 10 new languages. Every person the executive asks (some with experience in the area and others with no knowledge) will present a different pathway and process to achieve the goal. Just as any set of randomly chosen LLMs will present 10 answers to the same prompt when you ask 10 different times. It’s still the plumber who has to decide which of the 10 different ways to fix the problem is the “right” one based on decades of hard-earned experience. But I made my point clear: the plumber doesn’t go away, not really.

I worry about who comes next, and you should too

Worry might be too strong, but at the very least, we should all be thinking about the next generation (of plumbers). 

If you think about the typical localization career, most of us over the age of 30 fell into it through an affinity for language and foreign cultures, or just being at the right place at the right time (“Who speaks French in this office?”). Very few explicitly train for a job in our industry. The institutions that train professionals for career paths in the language industry generally lean heavily into (or are forced into) a dark corner of the institution where interest is low. 

And that’s the core issue: Higher educational institutions should be open to all the potential departments our skill set really falls into, say, in a global business school, exposing students to all the topics related to doing business globally (and arguably trying to stray away from all the acronyms our industry loves so much; they’ll have plenty of time to pick those up later). Alternatively, programs in technical writing, user-centered design, marketing, supply chain logistics, and other fields could all afford to include a localization component in their curriculum. If we continue to be confined to our niche, I am nearly certain that in a decade there won’t even be a formal education pathway anymore, and we’ll go right back to the time when people just fell into this field by accident.

Certainly in the U.S., language programs overall have been fighting a battle of interest. Our industry is competing for attention, and (depending on how much stock you put into the reports), the attention spans of younger generations are not very long. That’s why we should get out of our shells and push hard to get a seat in programs that offer more “fashionable” degrees with long-term viability, such as global business or information design. Exactly the kind of bridges we are building with our stakeholders. We’ve been so focused on making the case for this “localization thing” to the C-level for so long, and we’ve done a decent job of that. Now, we should do the same in approaching those who educated that C-suite executive in the first place.

I’ll leave you with another question that is bigger than can be answered in one article: What are we doing to embrace new talent, pull in interest from other areas of study, and bring it into our industry?

It’s rare for new talent to appear at traditional localization events uninvited. It’s time we did something about that, too. Otherwise, I fear it’ll just be us, the geeks and the language enthusiasts, who continue talking to ourselves in our echo chambers about fixing the (global) pipes when our stated “transparency” goal is to get everyone in every department to think global from day one.

Read the full 132-page Global Ambitions: (R)Evolution in Motion publication featuring vital perspectives from 31 industry leaders on the ongoing AI-spurred (r)evolution.

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