Meet the Pride: Allie Fritz

In this installation of our Meet the Pride Series, travel to Richmond, Virginia, and meet Allie F., Lionbridge's Director of Interpretations. From keeping a pulse on immigration trends and demographic shifts to reviewing customer feedback, Allie ensures our interpretation teams have what they need to deliver stellar service. When she's not holding strategy meetings or studying up on current events, Allie enjoys running, gaming, and enjoying Richmond’s rich food and street culture.

Tell us about your role at Lionbridge.

I assumed the role of Director of Interpretations in 2019 after 9 years of working with the community management team on things like interpreter recruitment, personnel security, and quality assurance. As the Director of Interpretations, I still work with those same teams, but as part of a bigger picture.

My role entails working with all our Over-the-Phone Interpretation teams — Operations, Sales, Product, Engineering, and Community Management — to facilitate communication and ensure everything is working smoothly. We look at connection times, customer feedback, and new feature requests, among other things.

This means lots of cross-functional meetings, of course, but interpretation is a very complex, contextual, and ever-evolving industry. It’s heavily influenced by things like immigration, demographic shifts, and current events, so it also means that I have to keep up with what’s going on in the world. For example, significant global events like wars can cause a spike in requests for certain languages and sectors, but so can seemingly innocuous things, like tax season.

Our interpretation services are on-demand, in 350 languages, and the needs of our customers range from healthcare, to legal, to financial, to simple customer service. In essence, there’s a lot of ground to cover, but we have to be prepared to handle end-users' requests before they come in. This is where I work with our community team to pinpoint interpreter recruitment priorities. It’s crucial — and the crux of my job — to stay up to date and ensure we’re agile and equipped to handle the ebbs and flows of the market.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

I have a sort of ritual which is, at the end of the day, I love to look at the usage dashboard and see the tens of thousands of requests in hundreds of languages that we fulfilled that day. Every single one of those calls represents someone that we helped. It’s really motivating to have tangible evidence of how your work makes a difference.

What excites you most about the industry you work in?

In the U.S., the overall population is quickly changing. There is an upward trend of residents for whom English is not their first language. It’s exciting to see how language composition is evolving and figure out how we can adapt to those needs. It’s also really neat to learn about different immigrant populations in different states. Wisconsin has a lot of Hmong and Burmese, while Massachusetts has a lot of Haitian creole, and Cambodian. I’m always surprised and delighted by the diversity.

What’s the most exciting opportunity on the horizon for your team this year?

We’re both excited and challenged by the possibilities that AI is bringing to interpretation. Right now, the technology isn’t quite fast enough for real-time, phoneline bilingual conversations. It can keep up in the beginning but needs more work on registering speaker and language switches. However, it’s great at aggregating and summarizing interpreter and customer feedback. We can get actionable insights in minutes and use that saved time focusing on the bigger picture.

In other words, it’s not quite here yet for over-the-phone interpretation, but it’s definitely on the horizon.

How has Lionbridge changed since you started working here?

It’s changed a lot, but that’s only natural, seeing as how I’ve been here for 14 years. When I started, the interpretation business was largely focused on in-person interpretation, but remote interpretation grew to be much larger than we would’ve imagined. We were already investing in things like Video Remote Interpretation, Remote Simultaneous Interpretation, and Over-the-Phone Interpretation, but then COVID hit, which made those services explode. For us, it was an interesting confluence of strategy and circumstance, but it truly changed the entire industry.

Where do you live, and what do you enjoy most about it?

I live in Richmond, Virginia. I would call it a “manageably sized” city, in that it’s not huge, but it’s got a lot going on. In addition to having its own unique art culture, it’s close enough to DC that we get a lot of good restaurants, shows, and things of the like. It’s a best-of-both-worlds situation.

How many languages do you speak?

I speak English and French, and enough Spanish to get by.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I do a lot of running, reading, and spending time with my kids. I would also call myself a mediumly-intense gamer. I’ve played a lot of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, and Hades, among other things. (Author’s Note: Those games are not particularly easy. You should be impressed.)

What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?

When I accepted my current position, my then-manager said this to me:

“Don’t forget that you’re the expert in the room. Your age and gender don’t matter. If you are in a position of leadership, make sure you have the confidence to say what you know is true and not let other voices drown you out. If I don’t speak up, things won’t move forward.”