Four members of the Sandberg team have signed up to compete in our 2020 challenge:聽Bake-Off for Translators without Borders. Each of the participants will have to bake a traditional Nordic Christmas recipe, and as we hit our donation targets of 拢150, 拢300, 拢500 and 拢750,聽we鈥檒l post each baker鈥檚 recipe here, along with pictures of the final result!

We know it鈥檚 been a tough year for everyone, but it鈥檚 been even harder for those without access to basic health information in their language. Please consider donating to help us reach our overall target 鈥� it鈥檚 quick and easy to .

? 拢150 鈥� Christina鈥檚聽vaniljekranse

First up is Christina, with her classic聽惫补苍颈濒箩别办谤补苍蝉别听or 鈥渧anilla wreaths鈥�. These all-butter biscuits are a hallmark of Danish Christmas tradition, and their distinctive shape is recognisable to many around the world. What鈥檚 more, they鈥檙e easy to make with only six ingredients! The only special tool you need is a piping bag with a star-shaped nozzle, which you can pick up cheaply and easily online.

We think they turned out pretty great, and Christina certainly seems happy with the result!

Recipe for vaniljekranse (Denmark)

This recipe is adapted from .

Ingredients

Makes approx. 35 biscuits

200g softened butter
陆聽vanilla pod
180g sugar
1 large egg
250g flour
75g ground almonds

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 220掳C/200掳C fan. Take the butter out of the fridge well in advance so it鈥檚 reached room temperature by the time you start.
2. Split the vanilla pod lengthways and scrape the seeds out with a paring knife. To separate the seeds, mash them together with a pinch of sugar on the chopping board using the knife.
3. In a bowl, mix your homemade vanilla sugar with the sugar and soft butter. Beat in the egg. Mix the flour and ground almonds thoroughly and knead it into the dough.
4. Transfer the dough into a piping bag with star-shaped nozzle (10 mm) and immediately pipe into wreaths approximately 5 cm in diameter on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Leave a gap between each biscuit so they don鈥檛 bake into one another in the oven.
5. Bake the biscuits in the oven for 10鈥�12 minutes or until they are light golden brown. Allow the biscuits to cool on a cooling rack and store them in an airtight container.

?? 拢300 鈥� Line鈥檚聽pepperkaker

Next we have Line, with her take on pepperkaker, literally 鈥減epper cakes鈥�. Whilst these ginger snaps are popular all over the Nordic countries, they play a special part in a kicking off the Christmas preparations in Norway. Pepperkaker are one of seven types of biscuits Norwegians traditionally make before Christmas, and both young and old enjoy baking (and eating) them.

A lot of children will know the Pepperkakebakesangen聽(literally 鈥淭he pepper cake baking song鈥�) by beloved Norwegian writer and illustrator . In the song, the unfortunate baker mixes up the amount of sugar and pepper (just a liiiiiiittle bit of sugar and A LOT of pepper). This might be where our idea of pepper being a central ingredient for these cookies come from. Line says, 鈥淯pon looking for recipes for my own batch, I came across a fair few that didn鈥檛 actually use any pepper at all, but to live up to its name, the recipe below does contain a bit of pepper.鈥�

In addition to being a lovely snack, a lot of people may also fashion decorations out of pepperkaker. By making a hole at the top, you can thread a red ribbon through to hang the cookies either on your Christmas tree or in your kitchen windows. The lovely smell of ginger and cloves is an added bonus.

Line says, 鈥淐ookie cutting will hereby go down as a special skill in my books. Making the dough was fairly easy and can be done in about 30鈥�45 minutes. Cutting the cookies the next day was another case entirely. If I were to put my creations up in the windows, they might not draw the right kind of attention. My stars all came out a bit wobbly, looking more like a dancing Patrick Star (from SpongeBob) than any Star of Bethlehem. And my Christmas trees cakes might make the neighbours wonder why I have put poo emojis up in my windows!鈥�

Recipe for pe辫辫别谤办补办别谤听(Norway)

Ingredients

Makes approx. 40 biscuits

100g butter
75ml golden syrup
125g brown sugar
75ml single cream
陆 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
鈪� tsp ground cloves
鈪� tsp ground black pepper
1陆 tsp baking powder
240g plain flour

Method

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the golden syrup and stir. Allow the mixture to cool until lukewarm and pour into a large bowl.
2. Add the sugar, cream and spices. Mix well. Add the baking powder with a little of the flour.
3. Add the rest of the flour. The dough should be slightly loose. Wrap in cling film and leave to rest in the fridge overnight.
4. The next day, knead the dough on a floured surface and roll it straight onto baking paper to avoid having to transfer the biscuits to a different tray. Roll the dough out until about 2 mm thick. Cut into shapes using cookie cutters, removing the excess dough. Add the excess to your remaining dough and keep cutting until you have used all the dough.
5. Bake the biscuits in the middle of the oven at 200掳C/180掳C fan for about 10鈥�12 minutes until they are darkish brown in colour.
6. Once baked, allow the biscuits to cool slightly on the tray before transferring them to a cooling rack.

??? 拢500 鈥� Eloise鈥檚 mincemeat shortbread

Next we have Eloise, with her twist on two British classics. A staple of the Christmas table in the UK is the beloved mince pie 鈥� a small, shortcrust pastry pie filled with a mixture of spiced currants, dried peel and suet (the 鈥渕incemeat鈥�). But who says you have to stick rigidly to tradition? Most British cupboards have a forgotten old jar of mincemeat sitting somewhere near the back, so a great way to use some up is sandwiched between two layers of shortbread biscuit.

Recipe for mincemeat shortbread (UK)

Eloise uses BBC Good Food鈥檚 recipe, . Alternatively, you can follow along with her in the video below!

???? 拢750 鈥� Adam鈥檚聽saffranskaka

Finally we have Adam, with his Swedish聽蝉补蹿蹿谤补苍蝉办补办补听(saffron cake), which he baked for his son鈥檚 birthday. This cake is a classic Christmas treat in Sweden, but here Adam uses a gluten-free recipe. The聽尘补苍诲别濒尘补蝉蝉补听(almond paste) can prove tough to find outside of Scandinavia, but it appears to be readily available online. For you hardcore bakers, you can make your own. In a pinch, you can substitute with marzipan, but this might change the taste of the final product.

Recipe for 蝉补蹿蹿谤补苍蝉办补办补听(Sweden)

This recipe is adapted from , Swedish Bake-Off contestant and parter of one of our own translators!

Ingredients

Makes one gluten-free cake

100g butter
0.5g saffron (one sachet)
4 eggs
400g grated almond paste
1 tsp baking powder
Shredded coconut (for lining the tin)

Method

1. Heat the oven to 195掳C/175掳C fan. Melt the butter and saffron together and allow it to cool slightly.
2. Grease a 24 cm springform cake tin with butter and sprinkle the coconut around the inside of the tin.
3. Separate the eggs into two bowls. Whisk the yolks, almond paste, butter and baking powder together.
4. Whisk the whites until they form stiff peaks and fold gently into the batter.
5. Pour the batter into the tin. Bake in the centre of the oven for 35 minutes.
6. Let the cake cool for 10 minutes in the tin. Transfer to a plate and allow to cool completely.

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There are two main contributors to my colleague鈥檚 incredulity. The first one is the Nordic mentality. The second is the nature of the translation industry.

Janteloven (the Law of Jante) is an idea of equality where individuals don鈥檛 think themselves as being any better than the rest of the community. You don鈥檛 consider yourself any lesser either, but you try to see other people鈥檚 value as equal to your own. In the Nordic workplace, this mentality creates a culture where trust and respect do not have to be earned. I place substantial trust in each of my colleagues as a default. They can lose my trust, but they don鈥檛 initially have to jump through hoops to earn it.

This is different from the UK company culture, which is characterised by a distinct hierarchy.聽The polite and indirect communication style of British managers can disguise the fact that they are the sole decision makers at their company. In a earlier this year, a quarter of the UK employees interviewed said they had left a job because of a lack of trust in their workplace.

My British management peers might still have their junior employees make them a cup of tea, whereas I am sometimes found at the sink of our office kitchen cleaning dirty cups so that the others don鈥檛 have to. For a Nordic professional, the CEO rolling up their sleeves is an indication of the high level of mutual respect between colleagues, regardless of their role in the organisation. Courtesy across the levels of hierarchy makes the office atmosphere more relaxed and minimises power games and the need for office politics.

The translation community is characterised by a similar disregard for hierarchy in its interactions and collaboration. Size does not always matter in our industry since specialisation lends importance to the smaller players. The client/subcontractor roles may alternate and be reversed in the complex supply chains. The need for innovation drives language companies into R&D partnerships and technical alliances. Business is still based on personal contacts and recommendations through networks.

I was contemplating these characteristics when planning STP鈥檚 campaign to support Translators without Borders in their holiday fundraising appeal this month.

STP has been a corporate sponsor of this charity for the past seven years. The focus of their work is to provide people with access to vital knowledge in their language. This involves translating for non-profit organisations in the areas of crisis relief, health and education, and training new translators in under-resourced languages.

STP is registered with Translators without Borders (TWB) as a reviewer and translation provider for the Nordic languages, but our languages are not the ones they need most. We only get to donate a few hours of linguistic and project management work every other month. Yet we cherish opportunities to raise awareness of why language matters in humanitarian work.

To this end, the members of the STP team have cycled through Hampshire as a part of TextPartners鈥� European tour (Operations Manager Susan Hoare), completed the Great South Run (Project Manager Emma Tamlyn) and had their hair dyed (Executive Chairman Jesper Sandberg). I myself walked around with 鈥淟anguage matters鈥� tattooed on my back for two months last year.

To support this year鈥檚 holiday fundraising, we have set up a with a promise from the senior members of our management team to perform embarrassing dares for publication online as we hit certain milestones.

Rosie Marteau, TWB Senior Development Officer commented: 鈥淭WB is privileged to have the support of its colleagues in the commercial language industry, including STP who have been steadfast allies of our work for many years鈥�.

鈥淚n many ways we are two sides of the same coin; just as LSPs deliver translation services for corporate clients and brands, we support global charities and small local NGOs alike to ensure their life-saving information is in a format and language that people can understand, at times of humanitarian crisis. We understand each others鈥� work, and that makes us a natural fit for CSR partnerships such as STP鈥檚 sponsorship鈥�.

The work of Translators without Borders is of course serious, and it deserves to be supported even without silly dares like ours. But in the spirit of Janteloven, we wanted to muck in, add a little extra incentive and a touch of Christmas cheer to . We hope you enjoy!

To read more about the work of Translators without Borders, visit

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At STP, we believe it鈥檚 important to embrace language industry events and associations. And we do like our associations!

We are members of (draws breath): Association of Translation Companies ATC, European Language Industry Association ELIA, Globalization and Localization Association GALA, Translation Automation User Society TAUS and European Translation Companies Association EUATC.

I鈥檓 actively involved in ELIA, our Executive Chairman, Jesper Sandberg, is the Chair of GALA, and our Learning & Development Manager, Raisa McNab, has just been elected full Council member of the ATC.

That鈥檚 a lot of volunteer hours shared between us, and we do it for all the business reasons listed below. But also because it鈥檚 fun and we thoroughly enjoy it.

So, since online media loves numbered lists, I will share with you my eight reasons for getting involved in language industry events and associations:

1: It gives you time and space to think, away from your desk and your team.

2: It helps you put your views into perspective. Meeting so many others who are doing the same thing you are doing makes you realise that you may not be as smart and unique as you thought. Or, it may confirm that you are actually pretty exceptional and revolutionary. Going out there acts like a mirror, it enables you to see you as the world sees you.

3: It helps you to think more like a business and less like a craftsman 鈥� which is a risk for many SME owners and managers.

4: It gives you a chance to pick the brains of people who would never normally bother to think about your problems. You may even end up working on your issues in a workshop with competitors.

5: It forces you to push yourself, to stretch your limits, to get out of your comfort zone. Networking does not come easy to translators who are often natural introverts. But it is good for us.

6: All industry associations get revenue through membership fees, but most of them could not operate and provide the service they do on that income alone. Conferences are a source of revenue 聽that enables them to provide support to their members all year round.

7: Sharing your wisdom with newcomers, and those who know less than you, helps you sharpen your own thinking and adds to the collective industry expertise.

8: Prominent conferences with high numbers of attendees give our industry a raised profile and more visibility in the eyes of the wider public, which often doesn鈥檛 even know we exist.

As far as conferences go, we at STP have been keen attendees at language industry events for over a decade. Yet, it is important to check the value of frequenting them at regular intervals. Do the benefits continue to justify the time, effort and money we put into it?

Let鈥檚 look at the that took place in London on 21-22 September as an example of what is currently on offer.

In 2016, the translation companies in the UK sold language-related services worth 拢1 billion, which makes STP鈥檚 home turf the second biggest language services market in the world. The UK Association of Translation Companies organises an annual industry event for the benefit of its members, and in recent years, the convention has grown from a national meeting to an international event that draws foreign speakers and visitors alike. STP has always played an active part in the life of the Association, and we have had a representative on the council for as long as I can remember. So, off to this Summit we went.

The key note speakers have got to be the main attraction of any conference. In London, we had the privilege of hearing , a crime detective, experienced hostage negotiator and corporate trainer, who demonstrated how to glean information without asking questions, and how elite-level listening skills can be used to persuade, influence and negotiate. An impressive performance that left the audience begging for more.

At events, we also meet industry thought leaders face-to-face. We learned in London that the renowned translation guru, Renato Beninatto, has teamed up with Tucker Johnson and written a book. We will now all be rushing to add 鈥� the first user manual for the language services industry 鈥� to our Christmas reading lists.

Conference speakers can give us bite-size information about topics we may otherwise find too daunting to look in to, and they are obliged to do it in an entertaining way.

At the ATC Summit, Tony O鈥橠owd used the analogy of spaceships when digging into the intricacies of neural machine translation and how it differs from statistical MT. Alessandro Cattelan blew our minds with sheer numbers when explaining how his translation supplier database uses artificial intelligence for candidate assessment and automated selection. Kain Jagger definitely had our attention after demonstrating how little we knew about the concept of the 鈥楪reat Firewall鈥� of China.

One of the gems of the ATC Summit 2017 was Konstantin Dranch鈥檚 report on the UK language services market in 2016. This detailed, transparent analysis, commissioned annually by the ATC, revealed common trends while also highlighting the financial figures and future plans of individual key players. In an industry where any market information is scarce, reports like this constitute a valuable membership benefit for associations to offer.

Combined with the hands-on workshops, personal meetings and general networking gains, I鈥檇 venture to say the takeaways from these two days of intensive participation outweigh the costs. The long-term benefits can only be measured by how well we follow up on the business opportunities and how skilfully we apply the new knowledge to our daily work. In any case, the organising committee is to be congratulated, and encouraged to repeat their success next year.

Current opportunities

All local and global LSP organisations constantly strive to provide their members with new services and opportunities. If you operate within the language services industry, it is worth you acquainting yourself with the following three examples of the latest offering, and contacting the associations for further information on how you could benefit from these initiatives:

• The UK Association of Translation Companies has just launched a service helping its members gain certification to the ISO standards 9001 and 17100.
• While the industry conferences have traditionally been the playground for company executives, the European Language Industry Association has started organising conferences for other translation company staff as well: ELIA now offers an annual tailor-made gathering for project managers, and another one for sales and marketing experts.
• The Globalization and Localization Association is reincarnating their invaluable CEO forums by putting together a new CEO/MD programme. The ideas so far include regular group calls on the GALA Connect forum, webinars aimed at decision makers, and a series of CEO/MD interviews sharing lessons learned through experience.

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