In ten years I’ve been working in or near the gravitational field of localization in this brief time I did take a break and move more into software development, and honestly I missed the tangible nature of delivering products and content globally. My passion for this industry has motivated me to look at some of the myths that people I work along side believe about what we do. For instance in Part I of this series I discuss how people think they ended up here by accident. and Part II was examined localization is an insular industry. Today we look at the third misconception.
Localization is lagging regarding technology. This is certainly a sliding scale, to whom do you compare the localization industry and conclude it is lagging regarding technology? When working with the top technology companies that have hundreds and even thousands of engineers and developers employed, perhaps. Also localization professionals have been involved in innovation regarding machine translation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Do the current set of tools in the industry solve the complex challenges faced in localization fully? No.
But Peter Thiel is quoted as saying, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Yes the potential of technology often exceeds the execution. All of this does not equate with lagging. And in fact there are multiple cases for the opposite, work that combines the most ancient and the most innovate is found in localization. Connecting the entire work through the internet cannot be fully realized without localization.
One organization committed to keeping localization at the forefront of technology is TAUS. It is here where the brightest and most intelligent people in the industry are meeting in order to share their perspectives on solutions to the most complicated and future thinking technologies for the industry. It would be wonderful for them to market themselves more broadly and tell their stories in a way that changes this misconception.
Keep an eye out for the next post in the series coming next week regarding the misconception that there is no money in the industry.
Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn’t help us know what to say.
-Jonathan Sacks
Web Theologian 
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