Industry Careers
Localization Careers in the Global Language Industry
In our fast-growing sector, talent is always needed and people with a variety of educational and professional backgrounds are valued. Across many business verticals, localization professionals can choose among many localization careers. They can occupy diverse roles ranging from CEOs to software developers, translators to sales managers, interpreters to consultants, and many more.
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The role of a tester or quality assurance professional is to ensure that any localized product — be it a website, a game, an app or an online marketing campaign — works as well in the target language as it does in the source language. In the localization industry, a difference is made between a software and a linguistic tester. A software tester is responsible for testing the overall functionality of a product or content, runs software builds, and records bugs in bug tracking databases including problems with internationalization, incorrect currencies, country standards, etc. They often rely on automatic testing software to see how the app performs across multiple platforms and devices. A linguistic or language tester is responsible for the linguistic quality of the product or content and checks work received from language service providers. They often work as revisers and use automatic QA tools to detect errors, flag them, and calculate quality scores, or determine if the work should be re-routed back to the language provider for corrections.
In the localization industry, sales and account management positions are uniquely located with language service providers. Sales efforts can be divided into those that develop new business and those that cultivate and nurture existing business. Sales managers, also called hunters, find prospects, create new relationships, and bring in fresh accounts to the company. Account managers grow existing business. Since client relationships are already established, the main objective of an account manager is to keep the accounts active and bring in new projects and revenue opportunities.
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