This has been a great read! Being stuck on that exact edge from loc engineer to coder, fighting my imposter and also waiting not yet looking for THAT project to kick things off… this is very inspiring.
I'm glad it made sense to write it, at least for one person. I was a little bit unsure. I hope you can make the leap. If a project doesn't come up officially, you could maybe take the problem home and code a solution in your free time. It can be a chicken and egg situation: if you don't have real-life coding experience, you might never be officially tasked with solving a problem by coding. Or in other cases, your manager might not even be aware that there's a potential solution via coding. You may need to be proactive.
Hi Gergely, please keep writing about this, it definitely speaks to me! I did a web development course a few years ago and everything was good until we got to the JavaScript part...I struggled so much that I thought maybe coding is not "my thing". Maybe I just needed a little more patience. I'm currently very happy troubleshooting translation issues involving tags and creating parsers for XML, HTML, and JSON files among others. I also find the low-code tools fascinating. I work with software developers and more technically minded people, and I get frustrated when they start talking about things I don't fully understand. There's so much to learn and so little time :).
I always hated all the web development stuff like JavaScript. Debugging (finding errors or problems in the code to fix them) is also messier in web development.
In localization, you probably won't need much web development knowledge, or any really, unless you need to do some very specialized things. If you learn some C# or Python, you are good. You also don't need to be a superstar level C# or Python coder to be able to do useful things in loc engineering.
great post and exactly the way it has happened to me. I am starting Python now after macros, regex, etc. And, like you, I need an actual problem to solve and have so far not completed several of the coding courses I have signed up for :-)
Looking forward to further posts and thanks for putting all this into words - makes me feel not so alone with my doubts.
Angelika
(by the way, I was always impressed by the work you did at memoQ!)
You got this! I wonder how much hassle it is to access a SOAP API like memoq's from Python - if you have tried any of the memoq WSAPI stuff, or you plan to.
In Visual Studio (not VS Code, but VS "proper") and C#, SOAP is quite easy if you learn a few initial steps.
I wonder if you are "the" Angelika I think of. :) I just see you as "Angelika" here.
I am not yet into the web stuff, but have tried out a Python script with the project templates (executed on an XLIFF file to create an Excel table of segments with comments).
But sooner or later I will get into the API stuff as well. For now it's mainly file preparation, extracting acronyms and those kind of things.
This has been a great read! Being stuck on that exact edge from loc engineer to coder, fighting my imposter and also waiting not yet looking for THAT project to kick things off… this is very inspiring.
I'm glad it made sense to write it, at least for one person. I was a little bit unsure. I hope you can make the leap. If a project doesn't come up officially, you could maybe take the problem home and code a solution in your free time. It can be a chicken and egg situation: if you don't have real-life coding experience, you might never be officially tasked with solving a problem by coding. Or in other cases, your manager might not even be aware that there's a potential solution via coding. You may need to be proactive.
Hi Gergely, please keep writing about this, it definitely speaks to me! I did a web development course a few years ago and everything was good until we got to the JavaScript part...I struggled so much that I thought maybe coding is not "my thing". Maybe I just needed a little more patience. I'm currently very happy troubleshooting translation issues involving tags and creating parsers for XML, HTML, and JSON files among others. I also find the low-code tools fascinating. I work with software developers and more technically minded people, and I get frustrated when they start talking about things I don't fully understand. There's so much to learn and so little time :).
I always hated all the web development stuff like JavaScript. Debugging (finding errors or problems in the code to fix them) is also messier in web development.
In localization, you probably won't need much web development knowledge, or any really, unless you need to do some very specialized things. If you learn some C# or Python, you are good. You also don't need to be a superstar level C# or Python coder to be able to do useful things in loc engineering.
Thanks for answering! I should give Python a try. I heard it's a good language to get started...
Hi Gergely,
great post and exactly the way it has happened to me. I am starting Python now after macros, regex, etc. And, like you, I need an actual problem to solve and have so far not completed several of the coding courses I have signed up for :-)
Looking forward to further posts and thanks for putting all this into words - makes me feel not so alone with my doubts.
Angelika
(by the way, I was always impressed by the work you did at memoQ!)
Hi Angelika,
You got this! I wonder how much hassle it is to access a SOAP API like memoq's from Python - if you have tried any of the memoq WSAPI stuff, or you plan to.
In Visual Studio (not VS Code, but VS "proper") and C#, SOAP is quite easy if you learn a few initial steps.
I wonder if you are "the" Angelika I think of. :) I just see you as "Angelika" here.
Gergely
Most orobably yes, you are "that" Angelika, so, Hi! :) It's nice that we managed to reconnect via Substack.
Indeed, I am "the" Angelika (Zerfass) :-))
I am not yet into the web stuff, but have tried out a Python script with the project templates (executed on an XLIFF file to create an Excel table of segments with comments).
But sooner or later I will get into the API stuff as well. For now it's mainly file preparation, extracting acronyms and those kind of things.
Looking forward to interesting conversations!
Best regards
Angelika