The Irish government has invested a great deal of subsidy in education.
There now is a strong push to offer additional computer courses to cope with
the growing demand for IT and localization staff. This, combined with the
fact that Ireland is an English-speaking nation on the edge of Europe that
serves as a gateway to Europe and the Euro zone, made many US-based
companies decide to base their European headquarters or distribution centers
in Dublin.
Translators, localization engineers and project managers were recruited
from all over Europe to be trained and employed as localizers in Ireland. For
most translators, it was their first introduction not only to computers, but
also to the concepts of software localization.
Although Dublin in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a very attractive
place for localization experts, with many job opportunities and a strong
social network, software publishers began to doubt the validity of the inhouse
localization model. Not only did new recruits face a steep training
curve, but the rapid growth of products sold internationally and the content
explosion also created large localization departments that were difficult to
sustain. Business fluctuations—very busy just before new product releases,
very quiet after—contributed to this problem, as did the difficulty of keeping
translators in another country for a long time because localization really
wasn’t very exciting (imagine two months of translating on-line help files)
and not always well paid.
Software publishers increasingly realized that localization was not part
of their core business and should ideally be outsourced to external service
providers.
One of the first companies to realize there was a service offering to be
built around this need was INK, a European translation services network
established in 1980. INK became one of the first companies in the world to
offer outsourced localization services. In addition to translation into all
languages required by software publishers, this service included localization
engineering and desktop publishing and, most importantly, the project
management of these multilingual localization projects.