Middlebury Institute graduates discuss where they are working today, how the Institute helped them get there, and what advice they’d give to current and future MIIS students.
My name is Francesca Tantussi and I graduated with an MA in Translation and Localization Management (TLM) from the Middlebury Institute in 2022. I grew up in Italy, where I completed my degree and worked as a freelance translator and interpreter for several years.
I am now a localization project manager and title manager at Deluxe Media, working remotely from Oakland, California. I’m part of a team that looks deeply into new tech and how we can always improve and better fulfill customers’ needs with the best options available on the market. From subtitling to dubbing, passing through mastering and fulfillment, audio and GFX (graphics), in an era where AI is reshaping the entertainment and media market on a daily basis, I handle projects of MT (machine translation) post-editing, audio speech recognition, and text-to-speech workstreams, following the entire end-to-end workflows and services offered at Deluxe. I’m also responsible for coordination of client representatives in Latin America and am part of the stakeholders for the company’s North America team for production capacity tracking and data management.
I will never forget one of the most useful conversations I have ever had about negotiation of my salary and benefits with Winnie Heh.
I applied for this position on the company’s career page during spring break and received an offer after a couple of rounds of interviews and one written test. I was officially hired around the beginning of April and started to work in June, immediately after graduation.
Deluxe Media was one of the companies at the Institute’s Translation, Interpretation, and Localization Career Fair and a name I’ve always heard (fun fact: while I was living and working in U.K. before moving to the U.S., I interviewed for a contractor position with them in London, but chose another company in the end!). Before interviewing with Deluxe, I did a couple of mock interviews with career advisors at the Institute who helped me through the process.
I will never forget one of the most useful conversations I have ever had about negotiating salary and benefits with career advisor Winnie Heh. It was inspiring and empowering, because the negotiation I had with Human Resources about salary went exactly the way she predicted. Because of our conversation, I felt prepared for every possible scenario, and she had really helpful suggestions about how to phrase certain things, which made the conversation more natural and less anxious.
I also found my audiovisual class with Professor Max Troyer really helpful for getting up to date about the latest innovations and best localization practices within the industry.
My best advice for current students is this: be curious, do your homework (both in school and in terms of your professional and personal path), and always try to go the extra mile—that will pay off at some point.
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