Pablo: Entertainment Localization Professional Leading Across Languages

Meet Pablo—a Localization Operations Manager at Roku, working in the Entertainment, Media, and Streaming industry.

The only way to build community between diverse groups of people is by learning their culture, and the door to a culture is their language.

Languages: Spanish, English, French; lesser degree of Portuguese, Italian

Grew Up In: Spain

Degrees Held: Associate Degree in Illustration & Design; Associate Degree in Software Engineering

How have your language and cultural skills supported and/or enhanced your professional opportunities?

Language proficiency and curiosity has shaped my entire life in a way that is impossible to convey in a paragraph, and impossible for me to have imagined.

In school, I always found languages very easy to learn, even though I knew I wanted to work with computer science and art. When it came time to find a job I would love, my education looked good on paper for my application in Localization Quality Assurance at Blizzard Entertainment in France...

But it was my English proficiency (resulting from a passion for video games) and love for languages that landed me the job and the opportunity to leave my hometown, explore the world, and frankly, live a life that younger me didn’t even manage dreaming about.

Since then, wherever I go, for business or pleasure, I love meeting people from all over, learning other languages and cultures, and trying all the food—secretly the reason for learning new languages. I am fortunate that my career has enabled that curiosity as well as my traveling, people, and photography passions.

What advice would you share with current language learners or those considering studying a language?

There are several stages of learning a language; going through them in the wrong order, or all at once, can be frustrating or delay your progress.

1. Make sure to understand the structural part of the language: the grammar, alphabet, rules, etc. This foundation is the most “boring” part, but it will make the next stages infinitely easier.
2. Learn the language proper—whether it is at an academy, school, app, or wherever possible.
   
3. Immerse yourself in the culture. The main reason why people drop or forget a new language is because they didn’t find enough reason in their lives to utilize it and build the long-term patterns we built naturally as children when learning our mother tongue.

Always make sure to stay in tune with the culture itself, whether it is by consuming their media and news, hanging out with their people (especially their elders if you can), or straight up living in that country and working. Language can teach you to communicate with someone, but it won’t teach you customs, appropriateness, cultural differences, values, and many other factors that—in addition to language—create a culture.

It’s often said that English is the language of global business, and because of that, language skills aren’t necessary to succeed. Do you agree or disagree? Why?

There are plenty of things that can be argued in favor of not learning a language.

Those devices like the Universal Translator in Star Trek and Babel fish in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that allowed people to communicate with each other in their own language in real time are no longer Sci-Fi: Your phone can do that today!

However, none of those things will help you to connect and build community.

Business might be about money, but successful businesses understand the value of community: This is why the Localization industry will still thrive and why big companies have Marketing teams in different countries. The only way to build community between diverse groups of people is by learning their culture, and the door to a culture is their language. For example:

• The Inuit people have about 50 words for snow depending on its function.
• French people don’t have a word for cheap.
• Spanish people have a word for a specific type of nap that happens at a specific time of the day because it’s too hot outside.
  

These words are translatable, but without a broader understanding of the language or the culture, their meaning is diluted and incomplete. Understanding why this is important is the key to communicating between cultures, and—to be honest—it is also the key to being able to live together in the peace that we are still in the process of unlocking. It is the difference between tolerating another culture and loving it, as experienced by many people in large metropolitan cities daily or when traveling abroad.

Do you have an interesting, moving, or humorous anecdote featuring your language skills to share?

I have many, but here is one that brings to light the way our brains work once they are set in a language.

One day, I was at a meeting with my boss—an American man who'd lived in Japan for a long time and was fluently bilingual. The whole Asian office team were noticeably late to this meeting, and we were joking about it when I proclaimed: “How do they dare?" My boss looked at me perplexed while all my European coworkers immediately giggled. It took him a full minute to understand that I'd meant to say, “How dare they?"

Embarrassment aside, this illustrates how someone learning a language can make a grammatically correct sentence (an adverb, auxiliary verb, subject and verb: perfectly sound—right?!) that means absolutely nothing to a native speaker. There are always exceptions that you must learn and accept.

I wouldn’t change what I did that day, because I learned an important lesson: In language—much like in everything else—as long as nobody gets hurt, fail often and fast, embrace the laughs and pokes from your peers, and learning will follow quickly.

Check out our Connect with Spanish page—or explore another language of your choosing—for information about university programs, scholarship opportunities, testimonials, and more! Then tell us how you put your language skills to work @LangConnectsFdn on social media.

Know a multilingual professional who's using language skills in their work or career? Refer them to us for consideration in an upcoming Professional Profile.