Software companies require multilingual skills

G Sankaranarayanan / Chennai

Working with a wide range of language markets, Indian software companies need to promote multilingual skills, which at present are very specialised and can be hard to find and even harder to keep. While having foreigners on the rolls may give Indian companies a multinational look, nurturing in-house localisation and multilingual expertise can make a lot of difference to their business in the non-US countries.

As companies go beyond the US, they need to provide native language support to the non-US clients in French, Italian, German, and Spanish (FIGS) and Japanese, Chinese and Russian.

With the emergence of outsourcing of product solutions to India, the requirement for localisation, internationalisation and translation solutions also keeps increasing. The global language solutions market is estimated at $10 billion. In India, Nasscom says, it has identified local content development as a major opportunity for the domestic software industry.

Job categories

The requirement for multilingual skills in a software company arise in all areas— from project management to marketing communications. Broadly, there are two kinds of language jobs: language-enabled and language-centric.

Language-enabled means that the core profession of the professional is something else while the language knowledge enables him to deliver his services in a multilingual environment. Programmers having Japanese or German language knowledge are examples for language-enabled professionals. Language-centric jobs represent opportunities for technical translators, interpreters, Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) specialists, etc. In the BPO sector, multilingual customer support is a key issue, which offers language-centric jobs of many types.

Apart from the new discipline called language computing, job prospects in the areas of software globalisation technologies are increasing. Translators employed in software companies typically can get anywhere between Rs.6,000 to Rs.25,000, depending upon the language and experience. In high demand are the languages such as Japanese, German, French and Chinese.

Language training

IT professionals are now being called upon to provide not just IT solutions, but business solutions and interact with clients at various levels. The last three years have consequently seen an interesting trend of techies queuing up to learn foreign languages, and polish their skills in Japanese, German, French and Spanish. The demand for professionals having technical expertise coupled with foreign language skills has also multiplied in the job market. This winning combination, in fact, makes such a difference that sometimes employers are ready to overlook deeper knowledge of a technical skill if a candidate is proficient in a foreign language where the project is being done.

Most IT training majors having presence in non-English speaking countries, organise foreign language classes as a market driven initiative. The course modules also depend according to the need. While some concentrate on basic survival in the country, others focus on documentation.

While Canada is the destination of most IT professionals learning French, knowledge of Japanese language is probably the most in-demand. Not an easy language to master, there has been a spurt in number of software professionals joining classes to learn the language and the customs of the country. Japanese language has three scripts—Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, and it is the second, which comprises of all technical words. All foreign words, in fact, have been adopted in Katakana.

Bridging the language barrier

“The language expert acts as a bridge between the product team and customers. They don’t just translate documents but enhance customer perception of the technology and integrity,” says S Senthilnathan, CEO of Globalingo, a multilingual service provider based at Chennai, which offers multilingual training in marketing communications, documentation, manuals, Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) and typesetting, and presentation tools including FrameMaker, Ventura Publisher, Interleaf, etc.

The demand for language experts for software companies and organisations come from the need to internationalise and localise the products. “Internationalisation is the process of designing and developing an application so that it can be localised into any number of languages with minimal changes. For the successful internationalisation of software, a global approach to the development of such software, drawing from global user profiles, is a fundamental requirement,” says Senthilnathan. “On the other hand, software localisation is the process of adapting an application to a specific locale, i.e., to its language, standards and cultural norms as well as to the needs and expectations of specific target markets. A properly localised product also meets all the legal requirements in force in the user’s region.”

Software internationalisation and localisation

Senthilnathan points out that the process for software internationalisation and localisation are the two sides of a same coin, and is a must for today’s globally oriented software developers. “It has become the essential feature of any serious software planning, and no software solutions and services companies can afford to ignore this emerging aspect of quality software development today.”

Website internationalisation and localisation also represent a huge opportunity for language experts, adds Senthilnathan. “Here, you localise websites to suit your multi-cultural customers. Language, legal info, tax parameters, choice of images, colors and buttons, the style of the content, currency and date information, etc.—everything in a company’s website is localised to appeal and inform the target-country markets. And, website globalisation incorporates global design and development parameters to allow for simple and easy localisation.”

According to Senthilnathan, the European and Asian languages market are the fastest growing, demand wise. Also, software localisation and website internationalisation are key areas for global development, where the knowledge of non-English B2B languages are the key assets.

However, he laments that many Indian software companies do not seem to have a strategy to deal with the multilingual issues. “India, despite being a multilingual country itself, is yet to understand the global reality. We can emerge as a multilingual HR base as India can afford to learn languages easily.”

Technical abilities might get the project done, it is the soft skill areas which determine the overall quality of relationships at a client site. And learning the language of the country best bridges all barriers.