As the dust settles, it’s beginning to look a lot like export planning.

Growing back

Battered and bruised, yet by no means defeated, UK SMEs are once again engaging in trade after a period of unprecedented challenges.

For small businesses in Britain, the situation has been twice as challenging. The uncertainty prior to the Brexit deal and the preparations for a no-deal outcome already felt like a huge challenge for companies that don’t have large legal and compliance departments. Then the Coronavirus hit, complicating economic activity in markets across the globe.

Keys to recovery

All across Europe, businesses are waiting for the remaining pandemic restrictions to be lifted. It has been suggested that some restrictions will remain in place indefinitely, or will return on a seasonal basis.

What we already know is that the past 18 months have propelled businesses into a process of digital transformation that cannot be reversed. Increased digital capabilities have enabled SMEs to reduce their physical presence and venture further online.

Prior to 2020, 7 out of 10 people across Europe had already bought goods and services online. This increased further during the pandemic.

According to , the biggest increases in people shopping online were seen in “�Ħ Romania (+27 percentage points (pp)), Czechia and Croatia (both +25 pp) as well as Hungary (+23 pp)”. In Norway, the increase in online sales in terms of value was a staggering !

This means that your business, wherever it is geographically, can be part of the global town square.

You could hardly ask for better conditions for expanding your business and entering international markets.

Business travel is no longer expected – on the contrary. Acceptance of virtual meetings has made it easier to get through to people who were previously out of your reach. You could hardly ask for better conditions for expanding your business and entering international markets.

The UK Minister for Exports, Graham Stuart, has said that exports is one of the . The Institute of Export & International Trade reports that EU exports are continuing to bounce back with an from February to March 2021, despite the UK still being in lockdown at the time.

In the UK, the value of goods exported by SMEs rose from £81 billion in 2015 to almost £108 billion by 2019. An from 2019 states: “Of exporting businesses, the ‘1 to 9’ employees group made the largest value increases since 2018 (up 7%).”

Exporting means growth – for your small company as well as our national economy.

Overcoming barriers through export planning

Whilst the UK government encourages and pursues international trade deals, they don’t always address a key challenge for many business owners: How do I deal with the language barrier?

A recent report by Aston University’s Business School into 415 UK SMEs from different sectors emphasises the importance of overcoming this challenge. The research leaves little room for doubt as it “reveals that SMEs making use of language capabilities are in exporting than those who do not.”

The research discusses SMEs’ “�Ħmotivation, preparedness and attitudes towards developing language-related capabilities, as well as the actual use of available language capabilities”. It also establishes a clear correlation between doing that and driving the company’s growth and profitability of exports.

Put simply: improved language capabilities = increased export revenue and profits.

What a language service provider can do for you

The most efficient way of tapping into language capabilities is to partner with a language service provider that tailors their services to your specific needs.

Legal constraints

There may be a legal requirement for the material related to your product or service to be translated for your export markets.

For example, in the EU:

• The must be translated into the language(s) of the EU country in which your product is sold
• Certain investment information needs to be translated when distributed
• The defines what constitutes a medical device and what translations need to accompany it
• The stipulates that the labelling must be “�Ħeasily understood by the consumers of the EU Member States where a food is marketed”
  

To satisfy such legal requirements, you can’t simply rely on free online translation tools. Qualified language professionals must perform these translations. Our team would be happy to do that for you.

Customer awareness and engagement

In order to reach international clients, speak to them in their own language. Publish your marketing content in their language and optimise it for search engines (SEO) in that language. We have listed five good reasons for such SEO localisation here.

Multilingual marketing is about reshaping your company’s message to fit another culture.

Marketing in a different language is not just about translating words. It is about reshaping your company’s message so that it makes sense in another culture, as we explain on this page about multilingual marketing.

Your website is the face of your business. You want it to speak to potential customers in a way that raises their awareness and encourages engagement.

That being said, your most important channel for customer engagement is probably social media. This is where you’ll be touching people’s hearts and creating a loyal following.

Even in the Scandinavian markets where many consumers speak good English, you’ll find that people prefer to engage , especially on topics that really matter to them.

Have you ever wished you had an in-country community engagement manager? A person trained and appointed to:

• Take the social media messages written for your home market
• Translate and localise their content
• Publish them in another, market-specific social media group
• Manage the responses and replies to those posts in the target language

We can set up this solution for you.

Customer support

Once you have customers and business partners in other countries, you need to deal with their questions and support requests. They may wish to express these in their own language.

Do you need to hire new staff to handle those communications? Creating a number of Q&A templates that can be translated will allow you time to explore your options.

These templates can cover stock replies to frequently asked questions and you can even use them to build multilingual chatbot scenarios for online customer support. Read more about our tips on how to localise support documentation here.

Turn language from a barrier to a bridge

The Aston Business School research shows that businesses that invest in language capabilities are 30% more successful as exporters.

SMEs making use of language capabilities are 30% more successful in exporting.

You may already be taking professional advice on your export strategy in terms of pricing, customs compliance, payment methods, currency risks, insurance and packaging.

Turning to experts to learn about the role of language when entering international markets is no different. We are here to help you improve your language capabilities.

Contact us today to have a chat about where to start.

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This is the case with translators too. We all know something in language A gets transposed into language B. But here’s five myths about the translator profession we’d like to shed some light on to give you a better idea of how we work and what we can help with.

? Myth 1: Translators translate in Word documents

Yes, sometimes we do. We’re not fussy with formats here at Sandberg – we’ll happily work with whatever you have – but it’s likely that we’ll want to convert it into a format that we can use in one of the many computer-aided translation tools (CAT tools) we work with.

CAT tools are smart working environments that translators consider their “home away from home”. We come to work, we log on to a tool, and then we settle in for a little while with the task at hand. Here we have our cupboards and drawers filled with helpful tools that support the work we’re doing.

Exactly what are these tools? CAT tools vary, in both features and layout, but many will have the following:

• Source text (ST) on the left-hand side – The language you’re translating from.
• Target text (TT) on the right-hand side – The language you’re translating into.
• A glossary – A collection of terms, like a mini dictionary, that’s custom-made for a specific client or a specific field. This helps ensure consistency in choice of terminology, from one year to the next, from one translator to another.
• Translation memory matches (TM) – A collection of sentences, that are custom-assembled for a specific client or a specific field. These are graded on their relevance by a percentage. Say you have a sentence in the current project that’s very similar to a few sentences you or somebody else has translated in previous projects. The memory will say: “Hey, look at these!” and you can then choose if you want to reuse and/or rework any of them in your current project. There really are only so many ways “Terms and conditions may vary” can be translated, so reusing snippets like these allows translators to focus their creative energies on the juicier bits that require more mental effort.
• Machine translation (MT) – If desired, machine translation can be included in addition to the translation memory. If there are no relevant suggestions from the translation memory, then a machine translation can be automatically applied. Translators call this part of the job machine translation post-editing (MTPE). This is because we use the suggested machine translation as a basis to edit and rework to a final translation.
• When you’re done, you can take advantage of handy helpers like a spell-checker and a quality control tool to weed out things like typos and double spaces.

Good translators will look beyond their CAT tool to do research and check external reference materials (such as dictionaries, specialised glossaries and visual materials from the client that show how the translation will be displayed in the final layout). But all the helpful tools listed above are often within easy reach in the same interface – readily available at a glance and the click of a button – making not only our lives easier as translators, but ensuring greater quality and consistency in the translation, a win for clients too.

One of the skills translators develop is the ability to quickly decide what to retain and what to discard. Imagine a kind of swooping-down approach… or better yet, Terminator vision! We clock the source text (What is it trying to say?), we glance over to the glossary (Are there any relevant terms?), we zone in on the matches (85% match, but from 2018 – or 75% match, but from 2020? Assessing quality…), then a quick check-in on the MT (Anything worthwhile to incorporate?) to the final construction of the translation itself, using an amalgamation of the resources at hand as well as our own personal cyborg preferences – and voila: Target (text) acquired.

? Myth 2: Translators need to be excellent in the language they translate from

My family and friends often think the reason I’m a translator is because of my proficiency in the language I translate from. But for translators, it’s actually the oft-taken-for-granted skills we have in our target languages – the languages we translate into – that are the real reason why we’re great at what we do.

When you start working with or spending time on your target language, you begin to realise the true impact of things like syntax (sentence structure), collocations (words that go naturally together) and myriad other linguistic devices at hand when it comes to crafting eloquent, fluid language. There’s likely to be a few embarrassing discoveries along the way too. A-grade student as I was, I’d still managed to spell something as simple as “on board” incorrectly in Norwegian for most of my life (“om bord” is two �ɴǰ����)…

Being proficient in your chosen source language, be it English or something else, is important – we need to be able to understand the source material quickly and correctly (so not just the words themselves, but their meaning, connotations etc.). But as any translator knows, translation is not simply about transferring the words of one language into another. It’s quite possible to have a sentence in a translation that has none of the same words as its source counterpart – but the sentence still means the same thing and sounds good. This is where your excellence as a translator can really shine through.

? Myth 3: Translators just need a source text to translate

Yes, but also no. Translators don’t translate in a vacuum. Our translation decisions are informed by everything and anything.

You have an established glossary you’d like us to use? Yes please! A translation memory? Great! Want us to use machine translation? We’d be happy to! A client style guide perhaps? A brief with instructions about style, tone, formality, potential character limitations, intended audience, intended final format, etc.? All-important visual reference materials?

Anything the original content creators used to create the source text are materials the translators should be supplied with. We need them to put our translations into the correct context. In short: we love references! The more the merrier.

? Myth 4: Translators don’t need a good quality source text in order to translate

No, sometimes we don’t. Translators are used to working with source texts of varying quality. If there are a number of small grammar mistakes or typos, this isn’t ideal, but most of the time errors like these don’t impede our understanding of what the source text is getting at and can be worked around.

But every profession has a few recurrent grievances and bad source texts are a “pet peeve” for many translators. It can be especially challenging if the source text is unclear or ambiguous, or so imbued with heavy marketing jargon that deciphering what it’s actually trying to say becomes a bit like trying to solve a riddle.

The better the quality of source material, the higher the chance of the target material reaching that same level of polish.

Or when you can tell that the source text copywriter clearly has discovered a newfound love of “stream of consciousness” and helpful linguistic devices like punctuation and paragraphs are cast aside. Some obstacles can be overcome with a bit of research, but if the source text is still unclear, we’ll do the responsible thing and ask our clients for clarification.

So even though sometimes the translation can differ substantially from its source counterpart (at least on a word level if not on a meaning level), it doesn’t mean that we don’t very much use and rely upon the source text as our point of departure. Our job is to ensure the meaning of the source text comes across correctly and naturally in the target language, and our work is infinitely helped if the source lays a solid foundation to work from. The better the quality of source material, the higher the chance of the target material reaching that same level of polish.

? Myth 5: Translators just translate

Some do, and trust us, this can be more than enough. But translators today are often involved in other services too. We can choose to specialise in one or more areas, like market-specific copywriting, transcreation or multilingual SEO.

Many of us do regular editing work like revision and proofreading. Or there’s layout optimisation, where you develop the skill to spot a double space from a mile off and start thinking in typical typesetter ways of such things as  and .

How about curating a “naughty list” of abusive language to help improve an online detection tool? There’s no actual translation involved in such a task, yet it’s one of the many services translators as language specialists are able to help with – even if it can sometimes leave us a little flushed!

I hope you’ve learnt something new about what we translators get up to all day. Translation can often seem like a ‘black box’ from the outside: a source text goes in one end and a target text comes out the other. But as you’ve seen, there is a lot more to it than meets the eye.

Behind every great translation is a great translator – one who’s made hundreds of tiny decisions about how to produce the best possible piece of work within the constraints of the project. Looked at from this perspective, translation is truly an art, and one worth valuing.

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These words come out of my mouth quite frequently to certain people. I’ve found that humility can be my greatest friend when I’m faced with difficult decisions. Let’s be frank about it – most times the decisions are difficult because we don’t know which way to go.

If you’ve lost direction or need help with progressing in the right direction, you could do worse than turn to coaching or mentoring. There’s a range of support opportunities available, which my friend , a qualified relationship coach and strategy consultant, pictures as a continuum:

“At one end there is Counselling – empathetically listening and gently helping the individual to find their own voice. This is often non-directional and non-outcome focussed.

At the other end of the spectrum we have Consultancy – telling the individual what they should do.

In between these extremes, there is Coaching – helping the individual through open questioning to find their own solutions to achieve their own goals.”

What Neil describes as coaching, I’ve also heard being referred to as mentoring. To me, the difference between coaching and mentoring is so academic that I’ll use the two terms interchangeably, although it’s probably just as vexing as people assuming that translation and interpreting are two words for the same thing.

Mentoring can be formal or informal, often to do with career growth and skills development. Sometimes it can be so informal that you’re not even sure whether you have a mentor or not. What’s most energising about the process is its purpose: to help you explore what may be holding you back from fulfilling your true potential. After all, the world doesn’t need a dulled shadow of you; it needs the most fully alive version of yourself you are able to give.

Being mentored

I have benefitted from coaching/mentoring twice in my professional life: most recently five years ago when I took on the role of CEO. My key question at the time was ‘am I cut out for this?’. Mentoring helped me examine the ideas that were limiting me or blocking me from achieving what I wanted to achieve. My biggest takeaway was that ‘I can do it’, and that in the areas where I’m not able to attain the highest level of mastery, I should build a team around me who are. That’s what I’ve been working towards ever since and I’m very grateful to have such an adroit management team running Sandberg with me.

Being a mentor

Can any leader who wants to ‘give back’ become a mentor? You need good listening skills and the ability to delve into problems, options and solutions with your mentee, for sure. And a structured plan wouldn’t go amiss either.

A few years back, I joined Women in Localization’s , which pairs established localisation industry professionals with those seeking guidance for their careers in the field.

One of my mentees was Marta (not her real name), a thirty-something translator who was questioning whether she wanted to translate any more. Having travelled extensively – which freelance translating suited excellently – she’d settled down and now lived permanently abroad. With no intention of returning to her native country, she felt her language and cultural skills would eventually fade, and she wanted a job that didn’t rely on her native language.

Marta had tried her hand at content creation, but felt it was not for her. She’d worked for a while as a data analyst and concluded the same. She had enrolled on a master’s degree programme in localisation hoping that it would lead to an in-house position at a language services company. But studying just wasn’t as inspiring as it had been on her bachelor’s course.

Over the months, we explored Marta’s interest in taking up a managerial role. I was able to assure her it wasn’t unrealistic to consider a career change in her thirties – I’d done the same. We spent time figuring out who she was as a person, and she finally concluded that although she was capable of performing as a part of a team or company, what she really wanted was to do her own thing.

When I last spoke with Marta, she was thinking of becoming an author in a field that really interested her, perhaps getting a book published one day. She said the mentorship had definitely been worth it, and even though I’d often lamented our lack of structure and milestones, for her just being able to talk to someone from the same industry but at a different stage in their career had been valuable.

Reversing the roles

Reverse mentoring is the opposite of traditional mentoring. Instead of a senior staff member imparting their wisdom to a junior recruit, the senior colleague listens and learns from the junior one. The primary objective is to enable senior managers to stay in touch with their organisation and the outside world, which often means educating them about something like technology or diversity. But the advantages go both ways, as more junior co-workers have an opportunity to understand and be heard by their senior colleagues.

I remember bringing the idea up at our management meeting a few years ago, and the first response from my peers was: ‘So Anu, are you admitting you can’t keep up?’. There lies the rub: reverse mentoring cannot be implemented in an organisation without humility.

A while back, I chatted to Texan coach and team-builder . Having seen her in action, I know what an awesome mentor she can be. We were comparing notes and discovered that our respective experiences with structured coaching programmes had sometimes left us flat. Shelly surmised that perhaps the best mentoring right now happens organically.

With that in mind, I encourage you to go and seek out a mentorship for yourself. Right now.

Seven months ago, we were all facing the global pandemic together, bracing ourselves for the challenge of saving lives. Now our experiences have diverged: different countries and regions are at different stages of the fight, battling with varying degrees of restrictions and sacrifice. We encounter discord and seemingly impossible asks, and we need to get through them without ending up exhausted and burnt out. A powerful mentorship won’t erase the trouble and chaos, but can help us find our own path amidst that chaos.

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Recently we caught up with three of our interns and asked them about what they expected from their internships, what they’ve learnt, what their challenges have been and what they’re proud of achieving in their three months with Sandberg.

Jere is a student of English translation at the and interned as a Finnish Account Linguist. “When I began my internship at Sandberg in June, the world was, as it still is, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the remote nature of this internship, I was very excited for my first professional LSP experience.”

“Although this wasn’t my first internship, this was my first internship in a setting focused on language services, so I set some goals for myself: learning to use new tools (and getting better at using some I already knew), becoming a better translator and generally learning what it’s like to work in a professional setting.”

“Despite the unusual conditions, I feel like I’ll end this internship having reached all my goals and then some. I’ve got to use multiple tools and become quite comfortable with them. This could have been difficult to do remotely with no one physically present to show you how everything’s done, but I’ve been happy to see that even ‘silly’ questions have been met with supportive guidance all the way to the point where things are clear.”

“This patience is definitely important and encourages you to keep asking those questions that might seem silly: for someone starting their internship (or anything new really) in a new setting, things could easily seem a bit scary or overwhelming without this kind of supportive environment.”

This kind of constructive feedback boosts your confidence and encourages you to embrace learning new things.

“Constructive feedback from more experienced translators has been invaluable, even more so in cases where the subject matter might be familiar but the client has their own unique style that requires you to adapt, for example.”

“This kind of constructive feedback also boosts your confidence and encourages you to embrace learning new things: when you’re confident, the bar to try and learn new things is much lower than if you’re afraid of failing.”

“I’ve worked with many different people and every interaction has been pleasant and everyone has offered help when I needed it, for which I’m grateful.”

Lotta is a master’s student in translation at in Sweden and interned as a Swedish Account Linguist. “My goals for the internship were to learn as much as possible about what it’s like to work as a translator, about translating and about how to handle getting stuck on segments, retrieving information and working to tight deadlines.”

“I feel like I’ve learnt to translate much faster and how to find translations of tricky words. Both of those things will be useful to me in the future and I’m very grateful! I’ve translated very different texts and I’ve learnt project management. I feel like I’ve really developed my skills.”

It’s easy to doubt yourself and your capability, but if you’re persistent you will prevail sooner than you think.

But what about the challenges? “Project management for sure! It was difficult in the beginning, but it got easier and easier and now it is not difficult any more. There was a lot to learn in the beginning about translating as well, but it all sticks eventually and you shouldn’t worry too much.”

“It’s easy to doubt yourself and your capability, but if you’re persistent you will prevail sooner than you think. As I mentioned before, I do feel like my translation skills have improved significantly, which I am certain will help me during my last year at university. It’s been a challenge but also a blast!”

Jesper has a degree in Spanish, another in video game translation and localisation, and has just finished a third in Swedish. He’s based remotely in Manchester and interned as a Swedish Translator. “When I started this internship, my main goal was to learn as much as possible and really get a sense of how it is to work as an in-house translator, and as a translator in general. I had previously done some freelance work, however I never received any feedback and felt a bit stuck. At Sandberg, not only did I receive constructive feedback on a lot of my jobs, but I also felt like a valued member of the team.”

“The Swedish translator team were extremely helpful and always willing to help me and provide me with great feedback and useful tips. With regards to the ISO quality standards, they now finally make sense to me and I understand how they are implemented in an agency and in a translator’s daily work. Finally, with regards to the tools, I have learnt how to work with five different tools.”

“I’m very happy about the achievements mentioned above, and equally happy about the relationships I have been able to make here at Sandberg. Even though everything was remote, I still managed to make some friends. I have thoroughly enjoyed my daily contact with the Swedish translator team, the project managers and of course, my team manager.”

“Prior to starting the internship, I was a bit nervous whether I would be able to measure up to what was expected of me. I was questioning whether my language skills were up to par and whether I would be creative enough for the marketing jobs. I’ve found that these insecurities were just that, insecurities.”

I appreciated especially being treated as a valued member of the team, and not necessarily as an intern.

“With regards to being creative, it’s true that I have at times felt a bit scared to alter a text too much. This is as well something that my peers have pointed out. I believe this to be my biggest challenge moving forward, to trust myself enough to focus on translating meaning and not merely words, and thus creating the best translation possible. With all the help I have received from the rest of the team I am sure that this will come with time, and of course with effort from my side.”

“I’ve also learnt that investing some extra time in doing the proper research and reading through the references does make a great difference. This is especially important for a generalist, with so many different clients that all require different solutions and wordings (a lot of them being merely preferential, as I’ve learnt).”

“Overall, I’m very happy with my experience here at Sandberg. I’ve learnt a lot and my time here has passed incredibly quickly. I appreciated especially being treated as a valued member of the team, and not necessarily as an intern. It was clear that not only was I here for my own learning, but also in order to have a positive impact on the company. This, for me, makes all the difference and encourages you to work harder and feel a lot more motivated.”

Why not start your career at one of the world’s top specialist translation companies, getting guidance, support and training along the way? To find out more about what we do and the employment opportunities we currently have available, take a look at our jobs and vacancies pages.

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It’s a new year and (arguably) a new decade; the time for experts to demonstrate their expertise by foretelling what’s going to happen in the next 12 months. Why do you even want to know? Because it helps you decide whether to swim with the tide or push against the current.

In business, trend awareness enables you to capitalise on good opportunities, determine what to change in your strategy and monitor what drives the success of your clients and competitors. In multilingual content management, the mavens who make trend predictions usually highlight what’s likely to disrupt the language services industry or what will continue to fuel the growth of the language services industry.

“Let’s not talk about trends, let’s talk about patterns”, says , the CEO of , and I like it. A trend is a direction in which something is developing or changing. Patterns are recurring, often predictable events or circumstances. Trends may be seasonal and contain an element of speculation, whereas patterns should be perpetual by nature.

In the language services industry, the following themes are currently on everyone’s lips:

• The relevance of understanding clients and their clients
• The need to transition to a digital-first organisation
• The emergence of machine-first solutions
• The provision of artificial intelligence support services (e.g. data collection, processing and labelling)
• The improving quality of neural machine translation

Understanding clients is of course neither a trend nor a pattern, it is one of the cornerstones of a service industry. And as the entire global society in which the clients operate their businesses is undergoing digital transformation, it pays to know how they elect to tackle that challenge.

As for the rest, AI and technology topics are certainly trending in the language industry news. I’m pretty sure that machine-first solutions feature both in the ‘threats’ and ‘opportunities’ of every LSP’s business plan in 2020. We dig deeper into technology than any other element of our service provision. “We’re talking about the technology like it’s the thing that the user wants,” said the CEO at SlatorCon in London last year. “They don’t want the technology, they want the product.” Which I take to mean that whilst solutions matter to all of us, we don’t all need to know what’s under the hood.

There are two language industry patterns that feature highly in my decision-making in 2020. They present threats and opportunities to everyone involved in multilingual content management, and not least to premium-end specialist translation companies, like STP.

LSPs expanding product and service portfolios

Nimdzi estimated in August 2019 that media localisation services make up 14% of global language services revenue. With global marketing and games localisation revenue added to the figure, the segment accounts for a quarter of the world’s outsourced language services spend.

No wonder language service providers are keen to add localisation-adjacent services to their portfolios.

Given the rising consumption of video content across multiple platforms, media localisation has enormous potential. In recent years, media localisation experts have experienced double-digit growth with services that focus on improving search results across platforms and languages, on media buying and planning, and on digital advertising on platforms such as Google and Facebook.

2019 saw established multilingual language vendors (MLVs) acquire at least the following media and digital marketing companies:

Source: Slator¹

The acquisition pattern in the media, games and marketing localisation space serves as an example of two more generic trends: the language service providers’ desire to break into new areas of the content creation, management, delivery and distribution chain, and our need to diversify away from the commoditised, machine-replaceable localisation services.

It will be interesting to see what human resources will be matched to these new services, since they – like the AI enablement work (voice and image data creation, collection, labelling and validation tasks) – don’t require the skills of a qualified translator. Consequently, the language industry’s revenue growth from these new services may not end up in the pockets of professional linguists.

University degrees increasingly limited in covering language industry skills

Which brings me to the second pattern playing on my mind.

The concept of translation, interpreting and localisation as a modern academic discipline emerged in the 1950s and 1960s when the first theories and systematic studies started to appear. In the 1980s and 1990s translation and interpreting became a university discipline, and higher-education institutions created full-time bachelor’s and master’s level programmes in translation and interpreting studies.

In those halcyon days, translation professionals could graduate with a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree which meant five years of 25+ weekly classroom hours of full-time study under their belt. Many of these BA programmes have since merged with more generic linguistic studies and many European countries only offer translation studies at master’s level. This has turned the translation degree into a year-long, or at most, two-year-long course after a bachelor’s degree in some other subject. Such an MA course can consist of as little as 176 hours of classroom time.

Whilst degree courses are diminishing in terms of tuition hours, the volume of content to be taught to a contemporary translation professional has exploded. The graduates of the ’80s and ’90s who studied translation for five years did not have to spend any of that time on CAT technology, terminology tools, QA solutions, translation management systems or machine translation post-editing. Neither were they offered modules on translation project management, translation as a business or diversification in the language industry.

Today, in less than one fifth of the time, the university staff is expected to teach all of the above as well as the traditional skills in translation theory, vertical industry specialisation and comparative analysis between the source and target languages. Add to that the new services present-day LSPs are introducing to their portfolios, and you see how academic translator trainers have to choose between covering a few key subjects in a cursory fashion or devising a slightly more in-depth course focusing on one area only.

There are fewer translators studying for university level qualifications than before. Many practitioners enter the industry via other routes. The combination of evolving LSP services, the current content of localisation courses and decreasing student numbers on courses suggests to me that the next generation LSP people will not be translators but multilingual content miners, trackers, labellers, editors and managers.

The forecasting experts out there have already defined fashion trends, food trends, property trends, UX trends and fitness trends for 2020. I have just added two language industry patterns to the list. Now the question is, what will you do about them?

I’m thinking of swimming with one and influencing the other. I’m excited about the tide that is drawing language solution providers into new types of services and happy to continue expanding STP’s product portfolio accordingly.

As for the current that is sweeping European translator training onto the rocks, I want to contribute to building new programmes that bring new types of language professionals to the market. I’m considering getting involved in publishing material on teaching business skills and industry knowledge to MA translation students. As said, the best way to predict the future is to create it.

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1.
February 2019: ,
April 2019:
May 2019:
August 2019:
October 2019: ,
November 2019:

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Read on to find out more about what’s on at each conference and how you can participate.

19–20 September, London

This year’s ATC Summit kicks off with a look mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the language services industry and beyond. Automation, artificial intelligence and machine translation are all also on the agenda.

Our Executive Chairman Jesper Sandberg says on the Summit: “I keep going back to the ATC Summit because the UK is our home market and it’s the best event in the UK for us to meet all our most important industry peers. This year I’m particularly looking forward to hearing other people’s take on mergers and acquisitions, artificial intelligence and Brexit. This year’s venue is truly something special and quite out of the ordinary for an ATC conference!”

7–8 November, Brussels

Translating Europe is a project launched in 2014 by the European Commission to bring together different stakeholders in the language industry, such as language services companies, universities, the public sector and national language institutes.

The sixth Translating Europe Forum will be held this year in Brussels on the topic “Translation all around us – The added value of translation in business and society”. STP will have a presence in the form of our very own Anu-Carnegie Brown, who will participate in a panel discussion on the topic “Customer relations: meeting clients’ needs and creating value”.

Registration for the conference is . If you can’t attend in person, you can follow along online, as the entire conference will be livestreamed via the link above.

5–6 December, Hamburg

Now in its fourth year, Elia’s Focus on Project Management is the language industry’s only event devoted to project management. The event is spread over two days. On the first day, four expert speakers from within the language industry deliver seminars, while on the second day they moderate interactive workshops on the same topics.

This year, our Managing Director Anu-Carnegie Brown will deliver a presentation on the topic “Understanding the bigger picture: The context of service provision in the global translation market”. In it, she’ll talk about how the job of a project manager looks different at different LSPs. At one, a PM might be a cog in a streamlined machine that consists of a salesperson, account manager, language engineer, vendor manager, graphic designer and quality control colleague. At another, one PM might perform all of those tasks.

The best PMs understand how their role fits into the bigger picture. The broader your vision, the more value you can add. That bigger picture could simply be the service provided by your own organisation, or it might be the complex network of the global language industry.

The presentation and workshop is exclusive to conference attendees. and don’t miss out!

Find out more about the role played by language industry associations such as the ATC, mentioned above, in our Industry Insights video series.

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Ever since machine translation started to become the norm – in both academic and commercial contexts – users of machine translation have been asking themselves whether or not they’re doing something different mentally and practically when post-editing. This has also led researchers to ponder whether the language that’s produced from post-editing is actually a new one or simply a different type of translation.

What the research suggests

One such researcher is Antonio Toral, from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who has recently published a paper called . In it, he explains how he compared a number of post-edited texts with human translations of the same texts using simplification, homogenisation and interference as his main assessment criteria.

He found that post-edited texts tend to have lower lexical variety and lower lexical density, with sentence lengths matching the source text a lot more closely. These tendencies produce texts that are generally less varied and less rich. They also tend to be more homogenous and introduce significant interference from the source language. The sample size, metrics used and text types selected for this study have their limits, but it’s still quite interesting to observe this phenomenon.

The effects on the wider language

Language change is a natural process: it happens and it has happened regardless of machine translation, with factors like instant messaging, social media and a constant need for better, faster and more optimised communication being key drivers of this trend. Now we can add post-editing to the list of factors that influence how the language we read evolves and develops.

That said, an important note to make is that while things like instant messaging are entirely driven by human input, machine translation (and by extension, post-editing) is not that different. Yes, the text is produced by a machine, but the machine itself is trained on data that is generated by humans, so in a sense, the machine is simply replicating what we all write and say to suit a specific context. So while it is an innovation, it’s also solidly grounded in data collected the old-fashioned way.

The machine is simply replicating what we all write and say to suit a specific context.

One could then argue that machine translation is innovative in the way it recycles the language to reuse it when possible – a very “green” approach of not wasting any training data it has been fed. Data is, after all, the new high-value commodity in our modern world, and language data is incredibly important for any translation provider thinking about using machine translation to its fullest potential.

A different skillset for translators

At the end of the day, it’s easy to think – regardless of whether you’re post-editing or translating – that you’re just turning one language into another, right? While that might be true, the way you approach the task is substantially different on a fundamental level: when you post-edit, there’s already something there: you’re not starting with a blank canvas.

This may sound obvious, but it leads to a number of interesting habits for post-editors, one of which is the temptation to simply read the MT output and think “yeah, that’ll do, next”, especially if you’re pressed for time with a deadline looming. False translations, unidiomatic constructions and internal inconsistencies are among the most common examples of “under-editing”, so it’s important to always be careful and rely on good old-fashioned attention to detail.

It’s important to always be careful and rely on good old-fashioned attention to detail.

Oddly enough, this is complicated by the fact that the latest developments in machine translation, and particularly in , have led to great improvements in the flow and grammatical accuracy of the output: the language can sound so natural that it can trick post-editors into thinking that there is less to edit than there actually is.

This means that translators working on post-editing jobs should not underestimate the task at hand: yes, they do have the existing skills to be ready for it, but the process might be more mentally complex that they initially expect.

When is MTPE the right solution?

This is all well and good, but what should a buyer of translation services ultimately make of this information? And what should a language services provider take into consideration when offering translation and post-editing of machine translation?

It all boils down to the intended purpose of the text (and in turn, your buyer): homogenising the text might sound like a terrifying thought, but if you’re ordering the translation of a safety data sheet for a chemical product or a list of ingredients for a beverage, is the flow of the language really that important? Wouldn’t the opportunity to be faster and more productive when translating these texts with machine translation – which thrives on repetition and recurrent patterns – be far more appealing?

Wouldn’t the opportunity to be faster and more productive with machine translation be far more appealing?

And at the other end of the spectrum, if you’re dealing with a text that’s very creative, for example a client’s website that’s on view to the public, it might be preferable to consider a different approach. In this case, machine translation might not be the best solution and you should consider opting for transcreation for a better end product.

A good example of correctly used machine translation is usually an engine trained and used for a particular domain or text type. For instance, an engine built entirely with and for legal texts will generally perform well with the often formulaic and standardised terminology and constructions typical of that domain. Neural machine translation should also be the best solution here, since legal texts tend to have lengthy, verbose sentences that can be quite time-consuming to break down and translate manually without extra aid.

It’s safe to say that the decision to use MT should be made on a domain-by-domain and perhaps even job-by-job basis. If you want to know more about when it’s the right solution, download our free Guide to machine translation.

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As soon as the quality of the output is brought into question, though, the focus turns to the input. Was the service provider qualified? Were they properly vetted? What processes were applied? How did they demonstrate their expertise? What tools and resources did they use? Suddenly, everyone is keen to understand the correlation between the quality of what goes in and the quality of what comes out.

I am a member of the Professional Development Committee (pictured below) of the , a UK-based professional membership association for practising translators, interpreters and language services businesses.

For four years, I have worked with my volunteer peers to support the institute’s members in maintaining the highest possible standards within their profession. The committee contributes to this by devising an annual programme of training events and webinars, and by facilitating the record-keeping of members’ participation in these activities. In other words, it caters for continuing professional development (CPD) in the translation industry.

What is CPD?

It is hard to imagine that anyone in the modern workplace would still consider full-time education the sole training ground that prepares us for our careers.

However significant that initial learning period may be, it doesn’t take us all the way to specialisation. Nor does it equip us to cope with the fact that we end up changing careers three to four times over the course of our lives. And even if we don’t, the pace of change now makes most skills and technical knowledge in the workplace obsolete within five to ten years.

Sometimes continuing professional development is mandated by professional organisations or required by codes of ethics – this is the case in regulated fields such as medicine, engineering and law. But at its core, it is the personal responsibility of professionals to keep their knowledge and skills current so that they can deliver the high quality of service that meets the clients’ expectations and the requirements of their profession.

CPD activities can range from formal educational activities such as instructor-led training courses, workshops or seminars to more informal approaches such as work-based learning or mentoring. CPD can also include self-study such as e-learning courses and structured reading. It can be provided by commercial training companies, independent coaches and professional associations, or internally by colleagues and mentors.

CPD in the translation industry

What does continuing professional development look like in the global language industry? It should enable language professionals to keep up to date with new working methods and tools, and to specialise, diversify and stay abreast of the latest developments in their field of expertise.

The , a partnership project between the European Commission and master’s level translation programmes at European higher education institutions, published their first translation competence framework in 2009. This for translator training defines fives areas of competence which can also be applied to translators’ life-long learning:

• Language and culture – This encompasses all the general or language-specific linguistic, sociolinguistic, cultural and transcultural skills that constitute the basis for advanced translation competence.

• Translation – This refers to the transfer of meaning between two languages. It includes the analysis of the source document, implementation of instructions, style guides and conventions, assessment of what is fit for purpose, and justification of solutions and choices.

• Technology – This consists of the skills required to use translation technology in the translation process, but also the use of any workflow management software, search engines, corpus-based tools and other standard office software.

• Personal and interpersonal – This includes all the “soft skills” from time and stress management to teamwork, from the use of virtual communication methods to ergonomics, and from self-assessment to collaborative learning.

• Service provision – This covers the skills related to the provision of language services in a professional context – from client awareness and negotiation through to project management, quality assurance and invoicing.

I would add to these a sixth competence: the domain expertise translation professionals need in order to understand the subject matter of the text they work with. In my experience, this is the competence clients are most interested in.

According to the ITI’s records, most of their members partake in training that focuses on language development and maintenance, translation skills or subject-specific knowledge. However, many are also seeking high-quality, applicable and quick training sessions on business and technical skills.

CPD opportunities for translators and translation project managers

The CPD training currently available for language industry professionals varies in quality and relevance.

Language technology developers organise training for their own products. Membership associations try to provide opportunities, but the content is ad hoc and difficult for them to curate when the contributors are volunteers who mainly share their personal experience. Many translation companies offer webinars, usually to their own freelancer pool, and often in connection with training their own in-house linguists.

All these CPD offerings lack external moderation and evaluation. For domain-specific expertise, translators have to seek training and learning within the industry verticals they work with.

For the members of the translation industry, continuing professional development may therefore call for persistence and even creativity, but above all it requires a critical approach, a bit of research and simple planning ahead.

Write a CPD plan

CPD is most useful when it is planned. List the main areas of your work, articulate your long-term aspirations, identify your goals for the next few years, define what you need to learn in order to achieve your goals and determine which specific activities will meet your needs. Consider your immediate career prospects and think beyond them to the limits of your ambition and ability.

Write a . List the things you do well, where you need to improve, what new opportunities there are for you and what challenges you must face. And recognise where CPD fits in with other demands on your time.

Keep a CPD record

Once you engage in continuing professional development, keep a record of your efforts. CPD records must be managed in a format that can be easily extracted for presentation. The extracts should show when you did the training (date), how long you spent on it (hours), what exactly you did (description) and what you learned that you can apply to your work (learning outcomes).

The international translation services standard ISO 17100 paves the way for a systematic approach to recording CPD. It asks certified language service providers (LSPs) for assurance that everyone involved in their translation production process (project managers as well as freelance and in-house translators) undertakes CPD every year. It does not state how many hours of development are required – that is for each LSP to determine for their own staff and partners.

Ask for CPD evidence

Clients and employers should ask for translation professionals’ CPD records at least as often as they ask to see their CVs.

Translators are aware of their need for continuing professional development, and many are already structuring their CPD activities and keeping records. What is needed now is for clients to take an interest.

Checking on translation providers’ CPD efforts does not feature in the translation service requests for proposal, as far as I know. Nor is it part of translation companies’ vetting process for their freelance translators, let alone the hiring process for in-house linguists or translation project managers.

But it should be. The CV of a good, experienced freelance translator may not have changed much in the past ten years, but their CPD record for the past three years will speak volumes for their professional pride, how engaged they are with the industry and how proactive they would be as a collaboration partner.

So in the interest of the best possible output, let’s take notice of the translators’ input – and support them in their efforts.

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In recent years, the word transcreation has become a localisation buzzword, and is often used to define the process whereby copy is customised to transfer the intent and impact of the original message for the new target market.

It has been argued, however, that linguists were customising copy in this way long before the term transcreation became recognised. As a result, there seems to be mixed interpretations as to what distinguishes marketing translation from transcreation, and confusion both in terms of workflows and budgeting expectations. Some say that transcreation only applies to the adaptation of slogans, others apply it to any marketing copy that requires translation; sometimes a CAT tool is used, other times it’s worked on outside of a tool, in Excel.

Most of us will have been exposed to transcreation at work, such as in film titles, well-known brands’ jingles or slogans. The impact of a good or poor transcreation can be powerful. There have been several transcreation blunders over the years; famous examples include a number of automotive brands failing to realise the potential negative connotations of a model name when launching their product in another market. , General Motors, who were unaware that “No Va” means “It won’t go”, when launching their Chevy Nova in South America.

Another well-known transcreation mishap is , which was mistranslated into “do nothing” when marketed in other countries. That certainly wasn’t the message they wanted to put across in terms of using their services. This mistake led to a rebrand costing around 10 million US dollars!

Although we do seem to have a clear understanding of the ultimate goal of transcreation and the magnitude of its impact, it’s clear that we have a long way to go in terms of standardising the processes and workflows to enable us to achieve the desired outcome. TAUS recognised the gap in our industry for such information and have since released a document called “”.

With this document, TAUS has highlighted the importance of producing resources that answer many relevant questions surrounding this topic, such as definitions of marketing translation, transcreation, multilingual copywriting and how to set them apart from one another, as well as examples of translation, transcreation and copywriting in action.

I’m certain that in the future we will have a clearer understanding of transcreation as a service, but until then it’s clear that we can’t take the word transcreation at face value; it’s much more than a combination of two words. Regardless of what you think this elusive term means, the next time you see it, don’t be afraid to ask questions to get to the core of its role in each specific context; only then can the creative team take the first steps towards delivering a project according to expectations.

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