The Lonely Localization Manager

It's a bit strange, the way in which I get my work done.

Naturally, I play the role of localization manager and primary contact at developer meetings, and I manage budget and schedule for several projects at once. I've become the lightning rod for issues ranging from character sets to encodings to what-do-these-Chinese-characters-say. All in all, most localization issues are pretty well in hand because I've been able to manage them in a way that conforms to best practices, with a bit of experimentation thrown in to see how much better we can make things.

I suspect, though, that most localization managers who might read this have teams and staff and reporting structures. I would bet they also spend more time scrapping internally with development managers, QA and upper management, struggling to make localization conspicuous and wildly successful. I just make it work.

As localization manager for a software company in the early 1990's I went through that. I get a lot more done this way, and I enjoy it more.

There was that exception last year. I had a client that drove me bonkers because their entire corporate culture was geared to nothing more than tolerating localization, and that with a clothespin on their nose. Wish I'd been blogging during that engagement; it was a wild ride.