Seeing Automation as a Positive Thing

As a linguist with a cultural arts background, my attitude towards process automation had always been somewhat lukewarm. I love to take my time playing with words and exploring the unique elements of each language; “automation” felt like a buzzword for taking the human element out of the art of translation.

Technology, however, does not stop progressing, and even the localization industry now benefits from new developments in process automation through advanced software applications known as Translation Management Systems (TMS).

These applications utilize powerful algorithms to pre-translate new text based on its similarity to existing text translations in its database; they automatically commit newly delivered translations to that database, creating an ever-growing compendium of translation data that can be smartly reused and recycled; and they even produce reports on quality, efficiency, and overall performance, making it easier for linguists and project managers to understand how translation is shaping their business.

Suffice it to say, automation can be a good thing even for cultural arts alumni. 

Be it a TMS or Tableau, I now appreciate the fact that process automation is one of the most fundamental aspects of proper data management. And this is one of the great things about the Data Saber Program, because it not only teaches you how to use Tableau but also how to properly manage your data — regardless of the industry you’re in or the software applications you’re currently using.

My team has a lot of data: text translations, timeline and volume information about tasks, financial information for outsourcing, performance data of our suppliers, and more. All this information is centralized in one database, from which my Tableau account now creates automated daily and weekly snapshots that are emailed to my team and my manager.

I used to have to comb through all that data, manually calculating averages and trends and forecasts every week to accommodate the questions I was being asked by my team and by leadership about quarterly performance, workload capacity, annual expenses, what have you. But now, the answers to all those questions are available at the touch of a button, processed automatically by Tableau and presented in an easy-to-understand way using pre-attentive attributes (which I talked about yesterday).

I will never lose my passion for diving deep into translation, taking my sweet time to play with the fluid border between languages. But it is thanks to the Data Saber Program that I have developed a newfound appreciation for process automation and the role it plays in the localization industry.

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