Emily Taylor's Portfolio

TMS in the Cloud: The Great Equalizer

Written on September 11, 2016 – 12:24 pm | by Emily Taylor

“Today, there is no excuse,” writes Alison Toot of Smartling in her column appearing in the January/February 2015 volume of MultiLingual. She is referring to the prevalence and overwhelming benefits of cloud-based translation management technology. Indeed, there seems to be no reason why a language service provider of any size should still be using a desktop-based management system. Sure, there are some possible disadvantages, as Lee Densmer writes in the Moravia blog, but these are not only minor, they are likely to be resolved as the technology continues to evolve.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending a talk by Anna Schlegel here at MIIS. Anna is the co-founder of Women in Localization, an association dedicated to helping women advance their careers in the field of localization. Her presentation was mostly focused on how and why companies go global, but the topic of women in localization arose as well. Anna lamented the fact that women still don’t seem to have an equal footing in the world of localization. Specifically, she noticed male colleagues being promoted higher and more frequently than their female counterparts.

Alison’s column on translation management technology in the cloud and Anna’s observations about women in localization resonated with my experiences from my recent summer internship. I interned at the Department of State’s Office of Language Services as a translation manager. Language Services uses LSMS, a proprietary translation management system based on and hosted by Plunet. The senior project manager in our office, Rachel, used this to her advantage when she pioneered a teleworking program that eventually allowed her to perform her project management duties while working at home four days out of the week. As a dedicated mother of four, she now has more time to balance her family and work lives, and she recently moved to allow her children to attend school in the district of her choice. Without the option of teleworking four out of five days, the one-hour commute each way would likely have been too prohibitive.

Rachel is a role model for me; she is smart and career-driven (and also a MIIS TLM graduate!) but also fully focused on her family life. With the massive strides the world of localization has taken that Alison writes about, it is clear that this field will become more and more accessible for women. Gone are the days when we had to choose between a career and a family.

Alison is right – we indeed live in a cloud-based world. And we women have a lot to gain from it.