The fifth annual course introducing soon-to-be translation graduates to the global service industry kicked off at the University of Helsinki this week. The class of 2019 approached it with maturity and curiosity from the start. Everyone was familiar with at least one CAT tool – a great improvement on the first group I taught five years ago – but the notion of different rates for translation work involving translation memory matches or machine-translated output was still unfamiliar to them.

Pooling our personal experience from Nordic translation companies over the past 25 years with market research published by language industry organisations, my co-teacher Danilo Monaco and I taught the group about the global translation market – its size, profile and structure – and how it has evolved into what it is today. We discussed industry characteristics and trends: how different players can add value to long outsourcing chains, what is driving the current market consolidation and whether new players are disrupting the industry.

The students learned about the language service providers and their services, first by defining what vertical markets are and then by putting eight translation companies from different parts of the world under a magnifying glass to scrutinise their differentiators, business models and brand. We tried to assess their relevance to us today, whether as potential clients, employers or future suppliers. We looked at the translation industry organisations, deciphered the most common ISO standards and talked about the principles of quality management.

After that, we went through the job roles in the translation industry one by one, learning about the main tasks involved in each role as well as the performance evaluation criteria and career progression paths for each role.

As practical exercises, the students tried their hand at transcreating marketing taglines and scheduling a multi-translator project. By comparing notes after individually revising the same translation from English into Finnish, they realised how subjective the nature of linguistic revision work can be despite their best efforts to adhere to agreed rules and style guides.

A Harvard Business Review article published this week noted that 40 per cent of adults in Scandinavia have university qualifications. As tertiary degrees become more commonplace, they lose their value as a differentiator in the recruitment race.

To catch the attention of a recruiter, a new graduate needs to have a wow factor – a rare skill, demonstrable intellect or experience in an area which their rivals have not had access to. The latter unique selling point is what our sixteen students gained this week.

The translation industry is an industry of relationships. By teaching this week, we have laid the foundation for fruitful networking between new and experienced industry professionals. The other two teaching weeks of this course, in March and May, will build on that foundation and expand the network further by introducing new teachers from other Finnish translation companies to the group.

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The course took place at the University of Helsinki last week in the form of an interactive three-day workshop, and was deemed a great success by all parties involved. The idea of such a course was so enthusiastically received by the students that the numbers had to be limited. STP has had the pleasure of working with the teaching staff from the university’s translation unit in the Department of Modern Languages before, and it was easy to trust them to make the practical arrangements, select the students and carry out an evaluation of the course afterwards. Apart from this, they sat in only occasionally, turned up to escort us to lunch and participated in the debrief session at the end of the last day. The course content, materials and exercises were planned and provided by STP. They consisted of lectures on the job description and performance assessment of a project manager and an introduction to translation management systems and to CAT tools, as well as a two-day simulation of life at a translation company with clients sending a never-ending stream of jobs, competitors vying for the same jobs and translators’ mistakes leading to client complaints and claims for compensation.

The teaching staff shared with us this hugely encouraging student feedback after the course: “What I liked was that the university had clearly given Anu and Raisa a free reign with the content. The course was down-to-earth, real, skilfully planned and well implemented, so much so that university staff rarely manage to put together anything so closely resembling real life. The lecturers only checked up on us occasionally, which forced us to operate directly under Anu’s and Raisa’s supervision, ask them questions and work more independently than we usually do on our courses. No-one was trying to skive off their duties on this intensive course. The days were long and there was a massive overload of information, but the time passed really quickly and not once did I look at the clock wondering how much time there was left before going home. On the contrary, I could have listened to Anu and Raisa talk even more about their company and ask them lots of silly questions. The schedule held up well, apart from the last day when some of the students in the project manager role were too engrossed in their tasks to take their lunch break. The situation felt very real and we were all extremely keen to do well. The whole course should have been longer, lasting at least a week. I think I learned more about Trados in those three days than I have in the past three years. The course also offered more information about the everyday work of a translator than all the rest of my studies put together. It answered a whole host of questions I have wanted to ask about moving into the real world after university, which I haven’t been able to find answers to elsewhere.”

Interestingly from an LSP’s point of view, this feedback was also welcomed by the lecturers, who were emphatic about the fact that universities do not listen to such comments when they come from teaching staff, but that the words of students carry more weight and are more likely to help steer things in the right direction in the future. This is a useful tip for all of us hoping to better align academic translation studies with the needs of the translation industry.

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STP’s head office in Whiteley hosted four translator interns this summer; three of them were cross-border placements with interns from non-UK universities. The fourth trainee, Siân Mackie from the University of Edinburgh completed her internship in September and describes the experience as both interesting and helpful: “I had recently graduated with an MA in Scandinavian Studies with a distinction in spoken Norwegian and had also studied for a year at the University of Bergen in Norway. Before I came to STP, I had done the occasional piece of freelance translation, but I had never had the opportunity to use CAT tools or bounce ideas off a strong group of other translators sitting in the same room. When I heard that my test translation had been successful, I jumped at the chance to come down to Whiteley. Everyone at STP was welcoming and helpful, and it has been very interesting to get such a range of different translations to try, from technical to legal, from musician biographies to equestrian equipment, and from all three Scandinavian languages. The PMs did their best to ease me into the pace here, and I never felt panicked. I learned something new every day, and would certainly recommend an internship with STP to other Nordic language students.”

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