CLIS-Korean alumna lands role at global language service provider

Monday, Feb 08, 2021

Alice O'Leary ('19 BA, CLIS-Korean) has been hired by TransPerfect, a family of companies providing language services and technology solutions to global businesses, as a Project Manager.

The University of Texas at Arlington graduate works with a production team located in Europe that provides 24/5 service to a large international company.

"We get up to hundreds of projects a day... so we have people located in multiple time zones to cover the gaps of others," said O'Leary. "[As Project Manager], I receive the new project and analyze it for language pair, word count, and other metrics. I then will reach out to a linguist to see if they're able to take the job. Once agreed, I send the prepared source files to them to translate using our proprietary machine translation tool... Once the process is complete, it comes back for final review. Then I submit it to be presented to the client. All of this is done within fairly tight, strict deadlines.

Managing projects in dozens of languages, O'Leary said her language studies prepared her to not only work within her current language proficiencies, but also to identify unfamiliar languages and correct non-linguistic errors in those she hasn't studied.

The Modern Languages alumna, who studied Korean with a double minor in German and Localization and Translation, credits her education at UTA for giving her the skills she needs to excel in her new position.

"I cannot begin to say how well the Localization and Translation courses have prepared me for this," O'Leary said. "Dr. Smith and Mr. Carpenter know this industry very well, and they are so passionate about their students' success in this field."

Pete Smith, director of the Localization and Translation program, and Blake Carpenter, Localization and Translation lecturer, partner with language technology providers to ensure their students train on leading machine translation (MT) software.

"Since I had already worked with various MTs in class, I was so prepared," said O'Leary. "I'm going into this [job] not only eager to do the work, but knowing that I can do it."

"[Localization and Translation] may not have been my major, but it was absolutely what prepared me the best to get a job that utilizes my organizational strengths and my passion for foreign language."