I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [139]
Fortunately, the responsibility came with a "Sergey." To get control of the accelerating hiring within the company, the executive team had decided to allocate positions by department, with each approved job opening represented by a laminated photo of Sergey. The departments had some flexibility in the way they allocated their Sergeys, but when you showed up at the hiring committee, you needed to bring three "enthusiastic endorsements" for your candidate from current Googlers plus a Sergey to trade for the proposed hire. No Sergey, no hire.
It had taken us a while to post our position, interview candidates, and extend an offer, so it was August 2001 before Stephanie Kerebel, a native of France, joined our group as globalization manager. She had years of experience in dealing with professional translators and immediately implemented cost—saving measures, such as paying for translation by the word and not the job. That alone cut our expenses in half.
We had been directing our professional translators to use the console alongside the volunteers, to save time. We needed professionals to help with our most important languages because waiting for volunteers would delay product launches. There was also a risk that volunteers might intentionally sabotage us with bad translations, a risk we were unwilling to take with popular interfaces that might reach millions of users.
Stephanie saw other limitations to our system as well and recommended we supplement it with Trados, the industry standard translation—management software. Trados had a number of features useful to translators, including version control and a customized glossary that increased in scope over time, ensuring consistency across multiple projects and speeding translation while reducing the cost. Professional translators found it helpful, especially those who did not have an easy way to do all their work online. Stephanie announced she was buying a copy of the software for Google.
And so the i18n war began.
Marissa fired the first shot. The ellipsis at the end of "Forse cercavi ...," our Italian translator's rendering of "I'm feeling lucky," felt awkward to her, so she removed it. She admonished Stephanie to tell our contractors to "pay attention" and not create formatting issues. The head of our Italian office replied that he preferred the original translation: the three dots made the phrase more elegant. I asked Marissa why she had overruled two native speakers and our localization expert. The cork came flying out of the bottle.
Marissa claimed that one of the other engineers thought it looked as if our site had been hacked because the punctuation was unusual. She told me she had delayed pushing out the new Italian interface because of her translation concerns, meaning we had violated the agreement that localization would never delay a launch. And while she was on the subject, Marissa poured out a litany of issues with marketing's i18n approach: the slowness of professional translators, the time required for quality assurance, the resistance of marketing staff and translators to using the translation console. The capper was our decision to buy Trados, which would increase engineering costs because someone would have to insert translations manually. Engineering didn't have time to build Trados features into the translation console as we had requested. Why, Marissa wanted to know, couldn't we just hire people who were not only good translators but also comfortable working in the translation console?
Wayne Rosing, the head of engineering, weighed in with his perspective. He wanted to keep Google's back—end technology as uncomplicated as possible. Google ran faster with fewer systems, and each new technology we introduced slowed our progress like a remora