Allen Higgins

Localisation was a dream job for me, because it married my hobbies of computing and Japanese.

Symantec’s localisation team in Ballycoolin on the edge of Dublin took me on in December 1993. The group was responsible for delivering Symantec’s software in Asian languages that used double-byte character sets. I worked on translated versions that were destined for Japan.

Some years earlier I had lived in Osaka, Japan for about eighteen months. I was taking a break from university in Brisbane – doing the Aussie backpacker thing. In Osaka I worked in an English language school for business students and in a translation company that a friend set up.

At the same time I learned Japanese. The written language was what I liked best and it is easy to start learning when you’re immersed in the society. Everywhere you go in Japan you see signs written with Katakana characters. These are phonetic symbols, so you can figure out their sound. Then you can learn Hiragana, the cursive alphabet, which is also a gateway to understanding the specific meanings of Kanji ideograms. That leads to vocabulary, grammar and, gradually, fluency.

My next stop as a backpacker was Cambridge in England. I found a graphic design job there with Longman Logotron, an educational courseware company with about seven people, whose products for home computers served the UK national curriculum for schools. While living in Cambridge I fell for an Irish woman who was working there. A couple of years later we married and I moved to Dublin. Before that, however, I had to complete an electrical and computer engineering degree in Australia. I returned to the University of Queensland, graduated in 1993, then made my way to Ireland.

The Symantec premises in Blanchardstown.
(Photograph by Damian Scattergood, 1994)

My first goal was to land a graduate engineering role but just sending out CVs wasn’t a great strategy. While doing so, however, I learned touch typing. I picked up some work as a computer trainer, teaching short courses in desktop publishing and Microsoft Word at the Computer Learning Centre in Merrion Square. I also got research and writing contracts related to Apple resources for higher education. And then I landed a job with Apple dealer Glanmire Electronics, whose founder Joe Byrne employed me as service manager at the Apple Centre in Harcourt Street. I didn’t have the entrepreneurial flair you need to grow new lines of business. So, after about six months, I left Glanmire and joined Symantec’s Irish operation, which was headed by Austin McCabe and based in Ballycoolin, a business park in Blanchardstown.

At that time Symantec shipped its software on disks, so its premises was a factory first and foremost. The original building was a large square manufacturing space in the classic IDA design, focused on disk duplication, printed user guides, packaging, sales and logistics. It had to meet production targets every quarter and those targets kept going up.

In 1992 Symantec had added a software services group to this operation – housed in an open-plan office upstairs. There were twelve to fifteen people on this localisation team when I arrived. The core members included Stephen Brennan, the head of localisation, and line manager Tommy McShane. Both had moved to Symantec from Lotus Development. Tony O’Dowd and James Grealis were the other managers.

Stephen Brennan, Symantec’s director of localisation
(Photograph 1996, courtesy of Anna Browne)

The most significant people there in terms of creative engineering were Tony O’Dowd and Anna Brady. She was an amazing programmer who created the Pebbles application to open up DLLs and expose their text resources.

Every product line had to be localised. This work was a 50-50 mix of coding and testing. Soon I was editing libraries to make them look pretty for international customers. I started out as a localisation engineer, then became senior quality assurance engineer, and ended up in a project management role.

Localisation was initially seen as a bolt-on task before a product release, but the company came to recognise its strategic importance. Planning for localisation changed the methodologies and approaches of Symantec developers in the US. We got involved in projects earlier in their lifecycle and held weekly calls with the product development teams in the US – especially those at the head office in Cupertino and at the anti-virus base in Santa Monica.

Symantec did not outsource localisation work very much, but it used external language services. We tended to choose boutique translation businesses in the countries where a language was spoken. As the localisation group grew, we needed more people with language skills inside the Ballycoolin facility.

Master copies and packaging for some of the Symantec products that Allen worked on as a localisation engineer.
(Photograph by Allen Higgins, 2023)

In the case of Japanese, we initially tried to do the first user interface and documentation translations ourselves. Then a Japanese national who had moved to Ireland, Naoki Miyatani, was hired as a contract translator. Kevin Hogan, who spoke the language fluently, came on board, followed by Michiyo Hogan. Symantec Ireland also hired Irish engineers, including Vincent Weafer and Liam Begley, who had gone to Japan on a JETRO exchange scheme.

At one stage, I believe, our office in Ballycoolin had the most extensive Japanese language test lab for PC software outside Japan. After 1994, when the company opened a subsidiary in Tokyo, all the translations, proofing and testing were done there.

Microsoft Windows 95 was a big deal for the whole PC trade. It demanded all hands on deck at the Symantec software services group for well over a year ahead of its release in August 1995.

Apple had made its applications stack localisable a decade earlier. Microsoft had learned a lot as a software publisher for the Apple Mac. For Windows 95 it introduced a systematic process for its own suppliers and partners to follow. It started by sharing knowledge with the other companies, then sent out pre-releases and beta versions of Windows 95 so that we could get our products ready in good time. Whenever we got the latest build, there was a lot of busy work and we became good at updating our testing and quality assurance environments.

Microsoft also made an international commitment to ship its products simultaneously in all languages on day one. Symantec adopted this policy too. At the time we had about fifteen product lines, each localised for a minimum of three languages and available in standalone formats or bundled versions for OEMs.

Symantec operated in niche markets for software applications and there were usually two or three strong competitors in each niche. Sometimes it acquired those competitors. We also tended to acquire our way into new technology domains that stretched the localisation group in different ways. I worked on a number of products originally developed by Peter Norton Computing, including Norton Utilities 8 and Norton Administrator for Networks.

Towards the end of my time at Symantec there was a famous effort to finish the first Japanese localisation of Norton Administrator for Networks. When this work was done, we met a $1 million order for a computer network in the Unisys skyscraper in Tokyo by shipping a single boxed copy.

I left Symantec in 1996. One reason was the travel time. I was living at the opposite end of the city from Ballycoolin and, as the Irish economy heated up, the commute became longer and longer. By then I had received credits on 44 product releases and won two employee of the quarter awards – in June 1994 and March 1995 – because of the overtime that I was putting in for new releases.

I had heard on the grapevine that Iona Technologies was a great company and was growing very fast. Iona recruited me when it had about 100 people and had moved into new premises on Pembroke Street. Orbix, its implementation of the CORBA object technology standard, was selling itself and flying out the door. I joined a three-person quality assurance team that included Brian Breathnach who had worked at Digital Equipment in Galway.

Everyone in Iona tested their own code. The testing tended to be idiosyncratic, so quality management could be a problem. Localisation, though, was not a concern. Development tools like Orbix were usually sold without translated versions.

After Iona, I worked as engineering manager at Sepro Telecom and Havok. In 2003 I became a lecturer and research associate at University College Dublin Business School, focusing on management information systems.

Last edit: April 2023

© Allen Higgins 2023