After 13 years in the localization business I have covered most fields of the processes involved, from development or design to global shipping, mainly in the Information Technology products and services area.
Far from getting comfortable at this accomplishment, I'm always looking for new challenges, including sharing and learning better ways to meet goals.
Whether you are a translator facing a technical challenge or a corporation willing to offer your products or services to the world, feel free to contact me at mail@ramonortega.com with queries, comments, proposals, requests or suggestions.
Here are the details of my CV, just in case you might avail of my expertise:
From December 2005 till present Based in Spain right across the Portuguese border but free to move as required, I've been working as a Localization Consultant and Engineer supporting corporations and translators on a project or task basis. In November 2007 I started Alor Translations, to offer a more corporate-orientaded image. Services offered are but not limited to:
Evaluate, budget and carry out localization and translation projects such as web sites, software or printed material into any language combination.
End to end localization project management including translation, engineering, testing, bugfixing, screenshoting, language and functional sign-off and Quality Assurance (QA).
Support to marketing teams and product managers.
Local market (Spain and Portugal) research.
Localization engineering involving web sites adaptation, re-creation of alphabetically sorted localized indexes and glossaries, TM (translation memory) maintenance, extracting resources, re-compiling localized versions, amongst other tasks.
Some samples of products localized into other languages, either on my own or in partnership with Byte Translation, are:
Aimed to help translators, localizers and localizacion engineers alike, I developed the on-line String Length tool.
From May 2005 till November 2005 As a Localization Specialist at Epson Engineering Europe based in Paris, France, I carried out the localization process for manuals, on-line help, drivers and software bundled with Epson products, mainly printers, which included the following tasks:
Evaluate the localization process required by a product.
Set a timeline coordinating factory, marketing, vendors and in-house resources constraints.
Vendor support and evaluation.
QA.
Reduce costs through managing resources and leveraging from previous localization projects.
Design, implement and follow up processes across multiple departments as well as vendors.
From October 2002 till March 2005 As the Operations and Production Manager at Glotas Translation Services in Spain, I had 6 Project Managers (PM’s) and 3 to 5 in-house translators reporting to me as well as over 50 freelance translators and vendors. My main duties were:
Evaluate feasibility of client’s project proposals
Maximize productivity by monitoring current processes and tools while evaluating potential improvements
Allocate resources
Monitor and balance workload among PM's and in-house translators
Follow up on PM queries and issues with clients and vendors
Keep all projects on schedule and within budget
Assess Management on production capability and availability
Overall business profitability
Vendor assessment and QA processes
Recruitment of new hires
From July till September 2002 I worked as a Software Localization Engineer for LionBridge Technologies at Dublin, Ireland. Responsible for the process of localizing Microsoft Messenger into 10 languages, the role involved:
Preparation of deliverables to localizers
Workload assessment
Localizers support and management
Timely deliveries of localized files to the client as per localization kit
QA tests and implementation
Bug free files which implied investigation, assessment and fixing of localization bugs
From March 1999 till July 2002 I’ve been working at Microsoft Ireland as a Software Test and Automation Engineer for Access 9, 10 and .Net which involved knowledge of ASP and HTML since Access included ADP files (web-based database applications). The main tasks performed were:
Develop testing scripts and applications in Visual Basic 6.0
Update and manage source code using Visual SourceSafe
Manage the testing process performed by the vendor
Evaluate vendor's Quality Assurance
Vendor support in bug fixing
Run automation suites and debug automation tools
Enter and monitor bugs in RAID, a proprietary SQL Server bug tracking database
Participate in bug evaluation triage meetings
Improve and update testing and management tools
Analyze, design and automate test cases for localized versions
When I started at Microsoft Ireland I worked as a Software Localization Engineer for SMS 2.0 (Opal) from July 1998 until March 1999 which covered the localization project for the Tier 1 languages. My main tasks included, but were not limited to:
Manage the localization project performed by vendors
Hand off localization material to vendors
Hand off localized file to engineering
Support vendors in localization and debugging process
Monitor and apply localization efforts by the US pilot language (German) team
Extend Ireland pilot language (French) results to the rest of the localized languages
Contact between MILS (Microsoft International Language Services), vendors, testing team, management staff and engineering
Analyze, design and implementation of production tools to streamline tasks and processes
Debugging
From 1994 until 1998 I worked as a software developer for Tecno-Voice, an ISV (Independent Software Vendor), developing custom made applications both in Access and Visual Basic, mostly database front-end against Jet/SQL databases which in most cases were also designed by me.
Amongst other applications I developed Microsoft Opentool for management and configuration of volume licensing offers (MOLP).
In 1995 I took part in the adaptation and roll-out of Microsoft Manager 3.1, a Products & Services Support Group custom application, my first localization job. More recently, I have migrated, on a volunteering basis, Enable Ireland’s database from their legacy system (Paradox) into SQL Server. I'm a regular collaborator to Free Localization, a cooperative translation project to help webmasters get free multilingual versions of their websites
