Stridonium Conference | Guest post

                                                                                    Guest post by Christina Guy

“Communicating in Business – Getting Language Right”

Stridonium Conference, Cambridge – 24 March 2014

Speaking with businesses

As part of Stridonium’s efforts to raise the profile of the quality translation segment within our industry – and in a departure from the well-worn path – this conference aims to engage with businesses and talk to businesses about their needs and our services.

The Stridonium initiative has the support of high-calibre speakers such as:

Sir Colin Budd KCMG, former British Ambassador to the Netherlands
Charles Grant CMG, Director of the Centre for European Reform
Jeff Heasman, Director at the Pyramid Group
Andrew Wood, Consultant Solicitor at Birketts LLP and Director of the Netherlands-British Chamber of Commerce.

All of them will draw on their wide knowledge and a wealth of anecdotal experience to impress upon an audience of businesspeople and translators the importance of effective communication (and the pitfalls of getting it wrong).

As professional linguists we should be establishing contact with people outside our own profession. It’s what business is all about. We should be showing the benefits of engaging a professional linguist at the start of a project.  Instead of hearing the same message from the same speakers on the same conference circuit as we are herded down the road of translation technology, let’s take a different perspective.

In a profession that has more than its fair share of Have-a-Go Henrys it may feel like a Sisyphean task, but companies will never understand how much time and money they are wasting if we don’t show them. And to do that we may have to break the mould.

As a postscript it seems the idea has already found favour; it’s been picked up by two marketing magazines who have indicated an interest in working with Stridonium. And I’ve just been asked to lecture to businesses on this subject. It’s a start – it shows that this approach can work.

And we are connecting with business.

For more information about the conference and/to register, please visit https://www.stridonium.com/events.aspx

Chartered Linguist Christina Guy is a Dutch to English legal translator and interpreter based in The Netherlands. As a native of the UK with long experience in providing language services in the legal, commercial and diplomatic sectors, she is a passionate advocate of efficient quality. Several years ago she established the translators’ forum Stridonium with the help of other committed language specialists.

Tags: CPD, marketing, Stridonium, Translation