My work with Microsoft gives me the opportunity to be on the cusp of major advances in this industry. Although the job is nine to five, there is no typical day I could describe. About the only constant is checking email and voice mail first thing in the morning for anything which might have come in from the US overnight, or status reports from the companies we work with in Europe. I would spend the day checking up on the various projects - usually we have about three or four running at the same time - so there are a lot of telephone ops.
I'm the only person in IMG who works with graphics, so if there is a query in this area, it comes to me. I also run training courses on new media production issues. I do a bit of travelling during the year, over to Seattle where the Microsoft HQ is based, and to Europe to source and assess people for our database of companies which specialise in graphics, animation, video and special effects. Towards the end of a project I would travel over to the company we had assigned in Europe and do some trouble-shooting.
Microsoft WPGI is responsible for the "localisation" of all Microsoft software and hardware for the European market. By localisation we mean "de-Americanising" products.
Take a product like Encarta, an encyclopedia on CD-ROM; we would have to make it appropriate to the local market. It isn't simply a case of translating the language into French or Spanish - the content, the graphics, everything would have to be "localised". With a product such as Age of Empires, we receive the completed version from Seattle and strip out any text or graphics which are US-specific, then we recreate or generate it with content specific to our markets.
I am the visual media specialist - they give us big titles to make us feel important! I would have to break the product down and see how the visuals are put together. There are four people on the team including myself. The others are responsible for breaking down areas like audio to see how their end of things was put together. Once we had figured it all out we would send it over to the company we were working with and they would localise it for a particular market.
We try to generate a "turn-key" situation with companies we use regularly: we hand over a file, they know what to expect from us and we know what to expect from them. Sometimes we get very sensitive files - what we call bleeding-edge technology, which means products that are ahead of cutting-edge technology.
Those can't really go out of the company, so we have a fully functional lab here in Dublin and those files go to staff working on contract there to be localised.
Information on Microsoft websites has to be localised too. Sometimes updates of software which people will want to download have to be localised. We also localise stuff for MS Network (MSN), which has its own browser. You download the programme viewer and there are up to six channels on each of the six or seven websites. One of the most popular items this year was V-Style. It is a fashion/ design "e-zine" (electronic magazine) which was created in the US and localised by us for the French and German markets. In fact, everything is gradually becoming Web-based, even television.
It's great to be working here at the pinnacle of design. There is always something new coming in to us, so it's a constant challenge. WPGI employs mainly young people from all over the world, which makes for a pretty cosmopolitan work environment. Everybody is willing to help out and overall the workplace is relaxed but highly industrious.
The transition from the ethos of learning in college and my work here at Microsoft has been an easy one and the transition from work to social life is equally organic - work hard and play hard, that's our motto here!
In conversation with Jackie Bourke
