GALA Blog

GALA’s online career center, LocalizationCAREERS.net, has unveiled a few enhancements integrating with social media outlets. These additions make it extremely convenient for job seekers in the language technology and services industry to view jobs as soon as they are posted.

Avid Twitter user? Follow the LocalizationCAREERs.net twitter ID: @L10Njobs to get instant updates as jobs are add to the career center.

For  more detailed listings, like GALA on Facebook to access the Careers Tab and view recent job postings from the site.

LocalizationCAREERS.net is an international job board where companies can post openings related to globalization, internationalization, translation, and localization. Job seekers can post resumes and search for jobs by type, keyword, and location.

Interested in posting a job or looking to apply? Visit the website to learn more.

Upcoming 2012 GALA Conference

Called the Language of Business, the Business of Language, the upcoming 2012 GALA Conference is hosted annually by the Globalization and Localization Association, a non-profit organization that was created for industry enterprises to have a common forum, and to promote language services and technology. Conference attendees are anyone from language service providers and professional translation company managers and CEOs to localization businesses, and those within translation software and technology enterprises.

From what the GALA Conference website reports, 80% of last year’s conference attendees said they made contacts that will generate significant business for them, and even more said they learned concepts or practices that will directly help their business. Nearly 100% of attendees said they were extremely pleased with the conference in general. The networking alone can often make events like these worthwhile, bringing various types of LSP companies together to collaborate and trade services, like high quality Greek translation for localized translation service, memory translation software for input of language translation terms to the database, and so on.

Translation Company and LSP Program Content

Program line-up for GALA conference 2012 includes rich and informative speaker meetings, networking opportunities, and discussion panels. Some of the key features includes marketing translation services and how to use current technology, inbound marketing and other popular inexpensive resources like social media and mobile websites and language translation service request availability. Development of smartphone translation apps and other creative means of reaching target audiences will be discussed by LSP marketing industry leaders. Other content includes a speaker meeting led by a Trados executive, a film fest, and plenty of other valuable information for both translation company leaders and translators themselves.

How an LSP Conference Can Benefit the Average Translator and Translation Agency

As revealed in other articles, while there are giant corporations and companies within the language service provider industry, small translation agencies make up the vast majority, which means a very fragmented market and industry made up of thousands of small LSP businesses. But this is the very reason that something like the GALA Conference 2012 can be so beneficial. Many smaller LSP companies, as well as the translators within their networks, may think that such a conference can provide them with nothing that will significantly justify the expense of travel and attendance to such an affair. But as previously mentioned, nearly every single attendee was very pleased with this particular language service industry gathering, and the vast majority came away with several ways to help or generate more business for themselves. It stands to reason that when any professional translation agency is a small enterprise, almost anything can be learned from those who have achieved high profile success in the same industry. Add the information that can be gleaned by industry leaders, to the networking opportunities, marketing information and schooling, as well as many other secrets of the trade, and it seems a shame for anyone in the LSP industry NOT to go.

Mary Simpson
Community and Content Manager
Tomedes Translation Company

View the original article here: http://www.tomedes.com/2012-GALA-Conference.php

Long-term Members Join Veteran Board

Seattle, Washington, USA (8 November 2011) – Members of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) have elected four new board members for the 2012-13 GALA Board of Directors.  The board members, who were elected from a strong pool of nominated professionals, are veterans of the language services industry and have been long-time members of the association; two are current board members now re-elected for additional two-year terms.

The board members elected for the 2012-2013 term are:

Fabiano Cid, (Ccaps, Brazil)

Hans Fenstermacher, (Transperfect/Translations.com, USA)

Kim Harris, (text & form GmbH, Germany)

Gary Muddyman (Conversis, U.K.)

Cid and Muddyman are long-time members of GALA who will be joining the veterans on the board. Fenstermacher and Harris are on the current board and will begin new two-year terms following several past years of service.  They will work with three continuing board members: Serge Gladkoff (Logrus International, Russia), Xavier Maza (iDISC Information Technologies, Spain), and Shelly Priebe (Priebe and Associates, USA).  Board members Aki Ito (TOIN Corporation) and Arturo Quintero (Moravia Worldwide) will be finishing their service on the board at the end of 2011.

“The board sincerely thanks Aki and Arturo for their dedicated service over the past two years—they have worked hard with the GALA staff to spread the word about the association and our industry and to create new services and programming for our members,” said Hans Fenstermacher, who is the current Board Chair.  “I’m also delighted to begin working with Fabiano and Gary, both of whom have been active members of GALA for years.”

The new board will preside over growing member services for the GALA membership.  Under the stewardship of the current board, GALA has introduced a number of new programs and initiatives, including the GALA Standards Initiative, which is run by industry veteran, Arle Lommel.  In addition to GSI, this year GALA launched its affiliate membership level for localization buyers and launched GALA Marketplace to give members discounts on business services.  The association also continued to expand its educational webinar program and local networking events.  In 2012, GALA will hold its fourth Language of Business conference:  GALA 2012, 26-28 March, in Monaco.

About the New Directors

Fabiano Cid. Managing Director, Ccaps Translation and Localization

Fabiano is the Managing Director of Ccaps Translation and Localization, a company that has been providing language services in the Latin American region since 1999. With a degree in Liberal Arts (Portuguese Language & Brazilian and Portuguese Literatures) from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Fabiano is responsible for the company’s long-term planning and strategic partnerships. He started his career as a translator at Lazoski, Beninatto and Associates in 1996 and later that year moved to London, where he worked as a freelance translator for two years. Returned to his home town of Rio de Janeiro to found Ccaps in 1999 and since then has positioned Ccaps as a market leader in its segment.

For six years Fabiano was the Chairman of the Board of Milengo, when he raised the investment necessary for the company’s restructuring. He is also a very active member of the industry who is frequently invited to speak at conferences and write articles for specialized publications, especially in matters related to Latin America. He is one of the leading organizers of Think Latin America, whose last edition happened in Silicon Valley, with the presence of distinguished players from inside and outside the localization industry.

Hans Fenstermacher. Vice President, TransPerfect/Translations.com

Hans has been in the language business for 30 years. A speaker of 6 languages, he began as a translator and worked in virtually every production position possible over the decades. In 1994 Hans founded ArchiText Inc. in Massachusetts to provide localization and language services. Over the next 12 years, Hans grew the company, developing ABREVE®, a proprietary content globalization system, and working with end-clients around the world. Hans merged his company with Translations.com in 2006 and became a corporate Vice President. He now oversees 4 divisions of the TransPerfect family of companies and lives and works out of the Washington D.C. area.

In 2002, Hans was a principal founder of GALA, one of his proudest accomplishments. He served as GALA’s first Chairman of the Board until 2006. He returned to the Board in 2010 and serves as its current Chairman. Hans is also an Associate Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). He is a frequent speaker in the industry and contributor to publications worldwide on the topic of language, communications, localization, and globalization.

Kim Harris. Co-Owner and Managing Director, text & form GmbH

Kim co-founded text & form GmbH, a translation and localization solutions provider, in 1996. She has been actively involved in the language industry for several years, publishing articles and speaking on a variety of industry-related topics such as quality standards, and language and the internet. Most recently, Kim was invited by the Directorate General for Translation to speak in Brussels about trends in the language industry, and by the Washington State Chamber of Commerce to discuss the importance of language in a global economy.

Kim serves as Vice Chairperson on the current GALA board. She has served on conference program committees for a number of industry events including Localization World Berlin, LISA Paris, Networking Days Paris and Lisbon, and GALA 2009 and 2010. Kim is also a member of the Editorial Board for the EU Language Industry Web Platform, an EU DGT initiative whose objective it is to help our industry become more visible through professional knowledge.  A native of Toronto, Canada, Kim studied French and German at the University of Toronto.

Gary Muddyman. Managing Director and CEO, Oxford Conversis Ltd.

Gary Muddyman is Managing Director and CEO of Conversis. Established in 2003, Conversis is a U.K.-based leading provider of Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation (GILT) services. As Managing Director and CEO, Muddyman leads the Conversis’s strategic business development as well as overseeing a variety of other business interests throughout the Group. Prior to joining Conversis, Muddyman served as Director of Operations for K International Plc.  In this position, he was responsible for all the development and implementation of business strategies.

Muddyman previously spent 16 years working for London-based HSBC Asset Finance U.K. Ltd., one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world. During his tenure there he led various strategic, product, commercial and business development divisions. He was responsible for running a variety of central divisions as well as operational business units giving him a wide experience in all business disciplines particularly marketing and operational strategy. He helped create Metropolitan Collection Services, the debt management arm of HSBC and now the template for successful debt recovery throughout the world.  Muddyman received his master’s degree in business administration from Warwick University and is also currently actively involved in a number of not for profit organizations.

About GALA

The Globalization and Localization Association is the largest global non-profit association within the language industry, providing resources, education and research for companies working with translation services, language technology and content localization.  GALA member companies are vendors and buyers of language services and technologies.  They deploy sophisticated multilingual strategies and proven tools to take content and products to markets around the world.  For more information, visit www.gala-global.org.