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Future-proofingthe profession:Equipping the next generation of translators

A Translating Europe Workshop organised jointly by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation, the Chartered Instituteof Linguists and the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, and held atEurope House in London on 11 July 2014.

REPORT

CHARTEREDINSTITUTE

OFLINGUISTS

Table of contents

Introduction

Recommendations for stakeholders

Record of proceedings

Gurli Hauschildt – Director, European Commission Directorate-General for Translation

David Jemielity – Banque Cantonale Vaudoiseand University of Geneva

Dorothy Kelly – University of Granada

Panel discussion

Speaker and panellist biographies

Organisers

© 2014 Chartered Institute of Linguists, European Commission & Institute of Translation and Interpreting

Introduction

Are translators being trained to meet the future expectations of work providers and users oftranslation services?

Are they equipped with the skills they need to deal intelligentlywith technological change?

What part can academic institutions, professional bodies and in-ternational organisations play in preparing new and current prac-titioners for the challenges facing the profession?

3

These were some of the key questions addressed at the TranslatingEurope Workshop held in London, which brought together representatives from the EC, CIOL, ITI and the worlds of academia,business and technology to discuss how best to support the next generation of translators. Based on the issues raised by the presentations and panel discussion at the conference – transcripts ofwhich are provided below – the three organising bodies have drawnup key recommendations to stakeholders (p.4) on how best to future-proof the profession.


Recommendations for stakeholders 4

Increase cooperation between academic institutions, professional associations and employers/users of translation service providers through regular contactand joint projects.

Work collaboratively to provide continuing professional development opportunities to improve specialist domain knowledge and technological, interpersonal, intercultural and professional skills, for both recent graduates and established translators.

Increase support for newly established translators through formal and informal contact with experienced practitioners, particularly through mentoring programmes and internships.

Facilitate access to reliable and comprehensive information on training opportunities and resources.

Engage with business, industry, government and othertranslation users to support informed commissioning oftranslation services.


Record of proceedings 5

Good afternoon. I’m verypleased to be with you herethis afternoon. I’d like to

thank Rosie and I’d like to thankour partners – the Chartered Institute of Linguists and the

Institute of Translation and Interpreting – for co-organising this event with us.

I’ll be speaking obviously a little bit aboutthe European Commission’s Directorate-Generalfor Translation – what we do to help the profession that we love so dearly. We live from it,we live for it and we live with it. And I’m sure thateven after I will no longer be living with it, it willbe thriving. So I’m already challenging the title ofthis event.

I’ll be speaking a little bit – very superficially and broadly – about the evolution insociety and why I actually don’t see the translation profession as anything that needs tobe very much future-proofed or anything that isparticularly threatened in this world. I’ll be speaking a little bit about future-proofing thepeople in the translation business: the translators.

So, I’ll tell you a little bit about the European Commission’s Directorate-General forTranslation. So we are actually in the business, weare providing translation, we are providingaround 2 million pages of translation for theEuropean Commission, the other institutions andobviously at the end of the day our Europeancitizens. Our demand keeps growing. There isabsolutely nothing pointing to the EuropeanCommission downgrading translation in practice.We expect this year to reach 2.2 million pages inoutput.

Now we work with 24 official languages –into and from – so that brings to us to more than500 – 552 – language combinations. And we canproudly add that we also have the now-and-thentask of having to translate into and from non-EU

languages. Just to mention a couple of examples:Chinese (we actually have two Chinese-speaking translators), Russian and Ukrainian to take theother end of the scale, and Arabic. So we domore than the 552 language combinations.

Now, with such a big translation service,we obviously have to have a lot of people inhouse who are translating. So translators are thebackbone of our service. We currently have 1570permanent translators. For many it sounds like ahorror. For most of us it sounds like a dream and Imust say I am very happy with every single one ofthem.

As with other public administrations, thefinancial crisis has had its impact on our service.We are cutting 10% of our positions within 5years. We still have to do a 3% cut of ourtranslators. We try to cut more heavily in supportservices to preserve as many translator positionsas we possibly can, but we still have some way togo and by 2017 we will be 1525 translators. Thisdoes not mean that we value translation less. Wewill have to cope with an increasing demand withfewer people – I think the same trauma thateveryone else in this world is facing all the time:how do we better and more with less.

We have a limited number of shorter termcontract staff mainly to replace long-termabsences, so that we can keep up the speed. Andthen what is very important to us is ourpartnerships with the private sector, with thefreelance sector. We outsource massively: around27% of our production is actually handled by thefreelance market, through companies but alsoindividual translators.

It goes without saying that we arerecruiting a whole lot of people. We need highlyqualified and competent key partners and we willnow look at our key partners. Who are they? Firstof all, universities. We do very much cherishgetting high-quality recruits. Unfortunately, one

Gurli Hauschildt – Director, European CommissionDirectorate-General for Translation




could say, others would say luckily, education isnot a competence of the European institutions; itis a national, a Member State competence, so wecannot set out any rules on what translationeducation should be about and it might be just aswell like that I think. That’s not the discussion fortoday. What we can do is support the educationof translators, support maintaining a level,support maintaining the visibility of the professionand the work of universities.

The European Master’s in Translation is aproject which we launched in cooperation with universities in the EU countries in 2006 and theaim was to create a reference framework wherewe would set a high-quality profile and specifythe requirements that a translator should be ableto fulfil, what are the competences we expect anewly graduated translator to have. This is veryimportant for future-proofing translation. TheEMT network is a network of universityprogrammes that fulfil this requirement. We havejust had a new round of selection and I’m surewe’ll have even more next time around, but wecurrently have 62 universities that have one ormore programmes, and the UK can proudlyprovide 12 of these universities. And we are very confident that there will be even more UKuniversities the next time around.

Another important partner, as weoutsource 27% of our production, is the languageindustry. Here we have to be careful because wehave contractual relations with the languageindustry. There’s a limit to what we can do. Wehave to respect ethical requirements. We have tomake sure that we don’t give privileges to some,penalise others. They all have to get a fairchance. But what we can do is bring these peopletogether – some would call them competitors, Iprefer to call them colleagues – to bring themtogether and to make sure that we provide, weunite our forces, to provide as much informationas possible online on the language industry. It isan industry which is often perceived – I thinkwrongly – as being under-recognised. I don’tthink we’re as under-recognised as we think in thetranslation business. We have a certain modestybuilt in. We are not by nature very extrovert, sowe think that we are just tiny, small bricks in a biggame. It is a partnership between DGT and the

language industry but it’s also with theprofessional associations, which are very important for the visibility and the level of theprofession, and the universities.

The latest initiative is what you arewitnessing today. Today we have a TranslatingEurope Workshop. Here we have the support ofthe Commission’s Directorate-General forEducation and Culture. This is a Directorate-General with somewhat more money formultilingualism policies, Erasmus+ for instancealso, different cultural and multilingual policies,and it helps us finance the workshops. We aretrying to strengthen our role as a catalyst inbringing all the different actors together, all in thebest interests of the profession we love so much:translation. We will have a yearly conference inBrussels and I’m sure that it will be webcast. It willtake place on 18-19 September this year for thefirst time and we will have a number of workshopslike this one taking place in the Member States,not all the Member States every year but some ofthem, and I’m sure the UK will always be amongstthem, because you really are a great bunch ofpeople here.

Now, do I think we need to future-proofthe profession? I do admit that we live in an ever-changing universe, that translation needs arechanging. It’s a profession that is as old as SaintJerome. He was sitting there with his scholars andtranslating with dusty books and scholars wouldcopy it and the audience to whom the translationwould travel would be limited to a handful ofpeople presumably, maybe 20, but certainly not20 million. Today, we all use translation. It hastravelled through time, we’ve used it for trade,we’ve used it for diplomatic relations. Nowadayswe all use it: governments, other publicadministrations, organisations, companies, theeveryday citizen, and very often without realisingit. And that is the characteristic and the trauma oftranslation: when it is very good it is invisible. So,the better we are, the less visible we are. That’show it is and we will have to find a way to livewith that. But if you look around in your kitchen athome, you have a number of appliances. Theymay be produced in the UK, in which case it’snatural that you get a user’s guide in English, butit might also be a Siemens, Bosch or something



from France or even from Asia. And you wouldbe badly off if you had a Chinese or Korean userguide, I think, most of you at least. We take it forgranted that we don’t have to pay for it, notvisibly at least, because of course we pay for it,but I don’t have, when I use my microwave, to putin a coin – and I wouldn’t recommend it anyway –but I don’t have to put in a coin to understandhow my microwave oven functions. So it is agiven thing today. We expect it to be free oralmost free. We expect it just to be there, it fallsdown from heaven and the poor translator who issitting there in the small cyber cloud, well, shouldlive for something I guess.

The shapes and forms of translation arechanging. This is not the end of the world myfriends. Traditional human translation still exists.OK, Saint Jerome might have his doubts if he sawmy translators with their electronic dictionaries,with their databases, with their research on theInternet and I’m not even speaking yet about theCAT tool and machine translation. He might havehis doubts about the word “human”. We aremoving more and more in the direction ofhumans helping machines rather than machines helping humans some would say. I still claim thatwithout human blood, flesh and brain powertranslations would stay poor in this world.

We see it coming out to the massesthrough crowdsourcing and community work. Youprobably have at least one mobile device on you;I have two. I expect when I download an app formy mobile device that it will come with some kindof interface in a language that I can understand.You may have noticed when you update an appthat sometimes the app has been updatedbecause a new language has been added. Thepoor developer does not pay a translator totranslate; it’s community work. It’s an enthusiasticuser who says “My other pals who don’t understand this language should also be able touse this wonderful app”. But this is not the kindof work that takes work away from our translatorsnormally or from the translators on the freelancemarket. To a large extent it does not because it’swork that would not be translated otherwise.There’s no commercial interest at the end of theday that would pay for it.

We can be afraid and think “Oh my

goodness! Am I facing an alien invasion?” Or wecan say “Is it something I should embrace?Should I, in a distant chamber of my heart, find acorner for machine translation? Should I love it?”Well, it’s a good question. “Is it a threat or an opportunity? What is it actually that I’m facing?”To me, there’s nothing to be afraid of. To me,translation technologies are the equivalent ofwhat Gutenberg was to publishing and whatHenry Ford was to car production. Had it notbeen for Mr Gutenberg, we would still have SaintJerome there with his six scholars who wouldlaboriously copy what he had been translating byhand. We would not reach great masses. I verymuch adore Aston Martin cars and otherhandmade things. They are wonderful! What nicequality! If once in a lifetime I get a chance to seeone close up I’m lucky. I cannot hope to buy one.If it hadn’t have been for Ford, we would not beable to afford a car. It’s the same with technology.It is bringing translation out to populations acrossthe world and that’s good. It’s not a problem. It’san opportunity to provide everyone with gisting;it’s an opportunity to build bridges acrosslinguistic gaps in our societies, and it’s anopportunity for translators to concentrate not onthe boring, routine tasks but instead on thedemanding, intellectual and creative tasks thattranslators love. So technology is not an enemy;it’s a friend.

For me, future-proofing the profession is aquestion of combining translation with a numberof different services, that we package the thingswe want to sell to the world. Translation stays thebackbone, it is the mother planet around whichwe have a number of satellites and moons thatwill change over time depending on what isneeded. We will have to adapt, to evolve, buttranslation will always be the backbone. There’s a question of giving cultural advice,drafting support for instance, localisation, theseare already old things, marketing guidance, socialmedia branding, and it will continue. There willbe new tasks in the future and it’s just aboutseeing the new opportunities and grasping them.

I will claim today that this is a profession ofa lifetime. And it has to be a profession of alifetime for us at the Commission. If I recruityoung people – and I like very much young



people, I used to train young people in a distantpast – I can expect, unless they are caught byother challenges and want to change to anotherboss, I can have them, well not me, theCommission could have them, for around 30 or40 years. With the life expectations we havetoday, it could even become longer.

If I look at my own career, I started in thelate 80s translating for the European institutions. Iwas offered a choice between a pencil, a Dictaphone and a typewriter. When I showed mydissatisfaction they said I could have a typewriterthat could correct not less than 20 charactersbackwards. Do you remember those? They arevery charming. It was an Olivetti. That was thebest they could offer. I came from another worldat that point in time. I had my own PC. I was inthe training sector. I was developing trainingmaterial, exams and things, so I had to be able towork more efficiently. And some people wereastonished when they heard about my PC. It wasan old Amstrad. Some of you here might havegrey hair and remember the old DOS-basedAmstrad computer. And people would say to me“Gurli, you are absolutely insane. You will neverbe able to fill that computer. There’s so muchspace.” It had a hard disk of 20 megabytes.Today we get attachments of more than 20megabytes. But that was how life was. Just duringmy time as a translator, we have travelled all theway from the pencil to machine translation. I’mstill here. I’m still following translation, OK, I’m inthe management business now, but I still knowwhat my translators are doing. So for me thequestion is not whether we have a profession of alifetime – we do and must have a profession of alifetime – my question is: what are thecompetences of a lifetime? Because we will havethe same human flesh and blood and brain massfor a lifetime.

We have a number of basic professionalcompetences and then we have a mindset.Sometimes I almost think that the second part ofthat equation is the more important one. Thebasic professional competences. There’severything we want to put in the language andtranslation competences – it’s thematicknowledge, mastering technology, all thesethings that we expect a translator to come with.

But then we have the more general things, whichwill also help us develop through a lifetime. The ability to analyse and research is a very basicacademic requirement. We have it in all studies atuniversity level. The ability and the will to learnand develop – remember the will. We can be verycapable, our minds can be top tuned to learnsomething. If we don’t want to learn it, it won’tget there anyway. The ability and the will tochange. Without these things, however well-educated we may be, we will not be able tofollow suit with development.

What are we testing? Well, you willprobably have heard of the European PersonnelSelection Office. We have some verbal andnumerical reasoning, abstract reasoning and situational judgement. That’s just to sift in peoplewho should sit the rest of the tests. The maintests for us remain two translation tests. Why dowe have to test translation when we haveuniversities who are so perfectly well equipped todo it? Well, because we do not require peoplewho present themselves for a translation test inthe EU institutions to have a diploma intranslation. We require them to have the competences to translate. This does not meanthat linguists are not better equipped to do itthan others, and if we look at who gets throughall these tests, who are filtered into our services,an increasing majority of those are people whoactually have a university education in languagesand translation. We have an assessment centreand you would say “Why would a translator needto go through oral tests, such as a structured



interview, a group exercise and an oralpresentation? What does that have to do withtranslation?” Well, quite a lot actually, and it’s away to test all the basic competences that wethink translators should have: analysis andproblem solving, communication (obviously), delivering quality and results, learning anddevelopment (this is very important when werecruit for a lifetime), prioritising and organising,resilience (at the workplace with less is more andall this mantra – no money, fewer people, morework – people have to be resilient I’m afraid),working with others, and leadership (leadership inthe sense that we take initiative, that we takeresponsibility also for the group). We have muchmore refined requirements in the European Master’s in Translation and we can put them into7 main groups. First and foremost of course thecompetence to provide a translation service,which is much more than just the competence todo a translation. It’s very deliberate that it says “provide a service”. The very first dimension thatis mentioned is the interpersonal dimension. Ifyou can’t go out and market your abilities youwon’t survive out there on the market as atranslator. You have to be able to interact with theworld. You cannot just sit behind your computerand hope that Saint Jerome will send work yourway. He won’t.

Language competences? It goes withoutsaying. As for intercultural competences, they areactually important. Let me give you a smallexample. When I first started out as a translator, Iwas a Danish translator. At the same time therewas a Danish secretary who started. He did nothave to know two foreign languages, assecretaries only need to know one foreignlanguage when we recruit them. He had a verygood level of Danish and a more than decentlevel of English. But he had to do his shopping inBelgium, where you speak French or Dutch. Hebadly needed a mousetrap, so he went to thebiggest supermarket that he could find in thearea – a well-equipped supermarket, really huge.He was looking for his mousetrap and he didn’tfind it, because the first barrier he ran into was acultural barrier. The goods in that supermarketwere not grouped and placed in the samepatterns as he was used to seeing in Denmark.

The logic and the logistics of the supermarketwere different. So he didn’t find his mousetrap.What he did find, as this was still in the 80s whenwe had people in the supermarket, he did findsome very service-minded staff members of thatsupermarket and then he ran into his secondproblem: he didn’t speak the languages. Hespoke Danish and English; they didn’t speakDanish – I’m not surprised. They didn’t speakEnglish either. That might be more surprising butnot if you have to master already two languages perhaps. What did the guy do? He went down onhis knees on the floor and he played the mouseand then he played the trap. I don’t really know ifhe succeeded in playing the cheese also. It wouldbe surprising. But I take off my hat for the communicative competence of my friend. He gotout of that supermarket with a mousetrap in hishand.

What would you do today? You would takeyour smartphone, you would look up any onlinedictionary or any online translation programmeand you would put in the Danish word formousetrap and out would come the French wordand you would show that to the person in thesupermarket. The only problem today is that youwould not find a person in the supermarketperhaps, but, OK, someone else might be able tohelp. This is how things are changing and I thinkwe just have to follow. So the intercultural competence is actually also important.

Information mining is extremely important,because you cannot expect to be translatingabout the same thing for the whole of your life.You will have to be able to dig up thematicknowledge. We can have some thematicknowledge when we leave university but, to behonest with you, what I learnt 30 years back atuniversity is not quite sufficient today. Honestly,it’s not. So we have to be able to develop our knowledge. And of course we need thetechnological competences.

This is the web of these EMT requirements:language, intercultural, thematic, informationmining, technological, thematic – translationservice provision.

Back to closing the circle, bridging thegap. We try to support the visibility of theprofession, which we are very keen on seeing



survive and we are sure it will. We keep promoting and supporting universities throughthe EMT network. We interact with the languageindustry as much as we are allowed to, and firstand foremost, what we’re doing today is we’rebringing together the actors and stakeholders. Sowe have the university and we have the employerand we have the small bridge in between calledthe DGT – DG Translation of the European Commission.

I thank you for your attention.

David Jemielity – Banque Cantonale Vaudoise and University of Geneva

One Approach to “Future-Proofing” an In-House Team: Strategies and Lessons Learned

Good afternoon everyone. I’llstart just by thanking theorganisers of this event –

John and Rosie – and the EuropeanUnion for their kind and somewhat

surprising invitation to speak this afternoon hereat Europe House. As a dual Swiss and Americancitizen, who works at a Swiss bank, I willhenceforth tell anyone who asks that the peopleat the EU clearly keep an open mind.

Like many of you, I work in an environmentwhere the price of failure is high. It’s a bank:Banque Cantonale Vaudoise, or BCV – whencethe suit. It’s extremely important to us that we getour multilingual communications right. For severalreasons. First, we’re trying to sell stuff. Andeffective communication can help you do that. Afew months ago I spoke at a meeting of Google’stranslation team – I know people here think ofGoogle as dark technology – but Google is also60 translators on five continents, worrying aboutsome of the same issues we’re worrying abouttoday. And we talked about this issue ofmultilingual communications as a way of selling

stuff and we agreed that in banking and financethe importance of communications is probablyeven greater than it is in the tech sector when itcomes to making the sale, because unlike thestuff Google or Mac is selling, which is objectivelypretty cool, the stuff banks are selling just isn’t,and the stuff any one bank is selling isn’t going tobe that different from the stuff any other bank isselling. I mean, you do hear, especially amongkids, people saying “I love my Android phone” or“I love my iPhone.” Have any of you ever heardanyone say “I love my savings account”? No, meneither. So our marketing copy needs to beeffective, it needs to push the right buttons. Andit needs to push them across all the languagesconcerned.

At BCV, that means primarily French – ourbase language – English and German. Wetranslate just about everything into English,because we’re based in the Lake Geneva region,which is very international: about a third of thepopulation isn’t Swiss and not native speakers ofFrench. Our entire website – we’ll translate all ofthat, every single page, into English.



Here is the homepage in French:

And here’s the homepage in English:

That’s finance jargon for a press releasesaying how well the bank did, how much moneythey made or lost, what their overall financialposition is. Banks and other companies, listedcompanies, have to release these every quarter.Investors and other market observers payattention to this stuff. If your results are up, yourcompany’s share price will go up; if your resultsare down, the share price will go down. Andactually, your credit rating can go up and down aswell. If your credit rating goes down, it gets

harder and more expensive for the bank toborrow money, and so that compresses what’sknown as the interest rate spread or the yielddifferential between how much it costs us toborrow money and the exorbitant rates wecharge all of you for your mortgages. So this stuffcan have very concrete effects.

As can words – words matter – astranslators, we know this. And when we choose,in our financial reporting press releases like thisone, to render something like this:



If you toggle a bit though you’ll see somedifferences. That thing in the corner “Welcometo Vaud” – practical information on settling intoVaud – that isn’t in the French. I’ll start by justsaying that the idea for doing that, as well as thestoryboard and then of course the actual writing,but even the visual – that photo of the vineyardsover Lake Geneva, which the average Swissperson would find horribly clichéd but whichtotally pushes the buttons of the Brits who cometo live in Switzerland, or other foreign people – allof that was done by the translators. More on howthat works later.

We also translate a lot of our marketingcontent into German. We sell asset managementservices to pension funds and other institutionalinvestors in the German-speaking part of thecountry, and we choose to, as it were, “talk” tothese people in German, rather than talking tothem in that sort of Eurospeak English that all theother international banks use. That’s adifferentiator for us. It underlines our Swissitude,

and that’s a good thing in the market in Zurich.And so we’ll take out ads in the Germanlanguage press like that, which is on the frontpage of NZZ, and we’ll also place articles in thespecialised financial press, like this article here inFUW, and all that of course is translated.

We also translate for investors: that is tosay not people to whom we’re trying to sell stuffbut people to whom we’re trying we’re trying tosell the BCV share itself. We’re trying to get themto invest in the bank. The art of talking to thesepeople is known as “investor relations”. Here, theprice of failure in our translations – and by failure Iwould obviously understand inaccuracies but alsoany inauthenticity in the language, anything thatmakes us sound unprofessional and like a badinvestment – may well be even higher than theprice of failure in our marketing and sales supporttranslations.

But when things go well, we can use thelanguage in this stuff to push investors’ buttonstoo. Here’s a quarterly results disclosure.



like this in English (translating “confiance de la clientèle” as a “strong customer franchise”),

So those are some of the reasons why wetranslate at BCV: customers, counterparties,corporate image. And in any of these areas, theprice of failure, any failure to communicate ishigh, but so are the payoffs when you do it right.

So what that means is that at BanqueCantonale Vaudoise we’ll spend what we need tospend in terms of money of course but also time,resources, talent, to ensure that we succeed, atleast most of the time, in producing content thatis of course consistent across all the languagesinvolved, but also – and this is my point really –effective as communication across all thelanguages involved. And as we all know as

translators, there is sometimes a tension betweenthose two things.

So our quality question at BCV is nevergoing to be “Is this a good translation?” Ourquality question is going to be “Is this effectivecommunication?”

We don’t like the question “Is this a goodtranslation?” because we think formulating it thatway contains a lot of implicit, ready-made excusesfor content that’s less than effective. You knowwhat I’m talking about: excuses like “Oh, thesource text said this, the source text said that, itwasn’t clear, it was difficult to render thatelegantly in the target language”, etc., etc., etc.

that might seem to many of you to be a little bitdebatable as a translation choice. But as a matterof fact I would submit that this language is a bitmore in line with how the financial markets talkabout this sort of thing. In fact, “customerfranchise” is a bit of a buzzword. So we can usethat buzzword – and this is where it getsinteresting for the bank – to spin the perception alittle bit. Part of the rationale for translating thisstuff into English is that it allows us to plant

certain terms – our terms – in the heads of marketobservers like Standard and Poor’s or Moody’s,two rating agencies you might have heard about.And that means we set the terms in which we gettalked about, because those rating agencies aregoing to be doing all of their talking, all of theirreading in English. And it works. We started usingthis as a formulation in about 2009; by 2011Moody’s had picked it up and S&P was still usingit a couple of months ago.



We’ve all been there. What I can tell you is,as head of multilingual content at a bank, ifsomeone comes to me with that, honestly, I don’tcare. If you’re my translator, you’ve got to get allthat junk straightened out with the owner of theoriginal text. You’ve got to make the changes thatare necessary to make your stuff work as writing,and you’ve got to have the owner of the originaltext totally buy into the changes that you’vemade. Your job is done when all that is done,when it’s effective communication – and when thetext owner thinks so too, even, especially, ifyou’ve ended up messing around a little bit withwhat she originally had.

Now, that’s kind of a tall order, both interms of people and skills and in terms ofprocesses, and I’m going to spend the rest of mytalk today unpacking that a little bit. I’m hopingyou’ll think it’s worth your time, if only becausethe approach worked in at least one place andthat’s our place, with our in-house team. Although, right now, in 2014, things look prettygood at BCV, at least from the outside, it hasn’talways been that way. Right now lots of peoplewant to work for us. Salaries are up since the mid-2000s. The UN tried to hire my senior Germantranslator – twice – in the last eighteen months.Both times we outspent them. I’ll admit it: it feltgood. We have pretty good relationships with ourinternal clients; our reputation within the bank isof a “high-functioning” unit; once in a while,relatively frequently, I get invited to talk abouthow we’ve positioned ourselves, how we “re-engineered” our processes, at events like these. Iam no longer scared of the CEO. So, you know,on a lot of objective metrics things seem to lookpretty good …and you can almost forget that lessthan a decade ago our team at BCV was totallyisolated and had a pretty cruddy brand imagewithin the bank actually, and we were about thisclose to getting outsourced or offshored orwhatever the guys at McKinsey would havedecided to do. Plus, worst of all, a lot of theEnglish and German content we produced wasn’tactually all that snazzy as prose. And that reallygets you, right, as a language professional,doesn’t it? It wasn’t entirely our fault. Themultilingual communications business processesBCV had put in place weren’t conducive to doing

high-level work, but if that’s your job, if that’s yourproduct, whether it’s 100% your fault or not, if atthe end of the day what you’re coming out withisn’t good, that is obviously discouraging.

So ten years ago, I would say that the BCVtranslation team was by no means future-proofed.We were having enough trouble just gettingthrough the present. We managed not to getoutsourced but we did actually lose 25% of ourpositions, so things at BCV 10 years ago werevery much less rosy than they are at the EuropeanUnion right now. And it would appear that thissort of precarious situation is relatively commonamong in-house teams: a lot of them are on thecusp, and soon as there’s a revenue crisis at thecompany, they’re just right there ready to getpushed over the edge into being downsized oroutsourced. This is happening right now at twointernational organisations I could mention – butwon’t – in Geneva.

So how do you go from a precariousposition like that to, as an in-house team, aposition where you feel relatively “future-proof”?I’ll provisionally accept that term.One thing I think you can do is take the idea ofdifferentiation seriously, on at least two levels.The first level is so fundamental I think it’s almostexistential for the thinking, at least, of an in-houseteam, and the second level is more of a processpoint.

So first, let’s consider differentiation as afundamental economic concept. If you start a newcompany – any company, a lemonade stand – andyou go to a bank for financing, the bank will notgive you any money unless you can tell themwhat sets you apart from the competition,because the bank is aware that there are otherlemonade stands out there.

As an in-house team at BCV, we neededthen to ask ourselves: what can we do for BCV byvirtue of being an in-house team that nobody onthe outside could ever do for them? To put itanother way – here I’ll haul in my McKinseybusiness jargon – how can we “leverage” the factthat we are under the same roof as our clients? Sothat’s one fundamental question that, ten yearsago, we needed to find a good answer to, andapparently at the time we didn’t have one. Howcan we make it worth BCV’s while to work with us



and not to work with someone else? Part of the answer to that lies I think in the

notion of differentiation but on another level:process differentiation. We quickly realised that asin-house team we weren’t going to be able todifferentiate ourselves durably based on criterialike unit cost, time to delivery or volumemanagement. Somebody out there – whoeveryour local translation Walmart is – is going to becheaper, faster, more readily, eternally – I’mtempted to say abjectly –available than any in-house team can be, and indeed any high-endtranslator ever wants to be. I think this goes forexternal providers too. So we didn’t want to godown the path of conceiving of translationprimarily or even importantly as a commodity,because then our career path would look like thecareer path of a coffee bean picker.

But we did think that we could differentiateourselves in a durable sort of way from externalcompetition by identifying a short list of what youmight call image-critical content for our bank, andthen building processes that would allow us totranslate that content in a way that could get it toa higher level of quality than anything BCV couldpossibly get from external providers, no matterhow much better and smarter they were than weare. And I’m sure there are a lot of externalproviders out there who are indeed better andsmarter than us.

Now what I mean by quality goes backabout two slides – what I’m talking about isquality conceived of as effective communication.

Just a caveat here: we aren’t going to doeverything this way: just the tippy top of thepyramid. We’re differentiating our levels ofquality. Everybody does that. But the idea was tostretch the scale of differentiation at the high end,to not be afraid (talk about splitting an infinitive!)of committing exponentially more resources or atthe very least geometrically more resources to ashort list of texts – of content – that’s critical forthe image of your organisation and / or critical forthe brand positioning, the brand image of yourteam within that organisation. And we thoughtthat there you could leverage some of the thingsthat are the case if you’re in house, andparticularly the fact that you can have face-to-facecontact with your clients.

So these processes that we built for thetippy top of the pyramid, they have a lot ofmoving parts, and I don’t have enough time totalk about them all today. So I’ll just touch on acouple aspects, the ones I think relate mostclosely to the idea of “future-proofing” theprofession, particularly relative to technologicaladvance, because I saw the questions and a lot ofpeople seem to be worried about that, or at leastinterested in it.

So, first off, one of the resources you haveto not be afraid to commit a lot more of is talent.Translator talent. And in particular, writing skills.That sounds boring and schoolmarmish but thereit is. Not everyone can write compelling prose, sowhile being a native speaker of the language inquestion is a necessary condition for high-endfinancial translation – and I will put myself outthere and say I think it is – it is by no meanssufficient. You’ve got to be someone who standsout, among other native speakers, for your writingskills, your sharp editing, your verbal creativityand your articulateness.

The difference between you, the high-levelprofessional in your language, and the averagenative speaker of that language should beroughly akin to the difference between being acardiologist and having a pulse.

So at BCV we needed to rethink what wewere looking for in our hiring decisions. Forstarters, no more bilinguals. But more generally,we started looking for people with an acute senseof what reads well and a knack for turning niftyphrases in their target language. And people like



that are expensive. So the second resource youneed not to be afraid to commit more of ismoney. For English this was particularly tough forus in Lausanne, Switzerland: I mean, nativeEnglish speakers are kind of thin on the groundover there, so when you don’t have a deep talentpool it’s hard to find really good people. Weactually ended up using a headhunter firm torecruit an English translator a few years back,which is an indication of the change in theperceived value of the function in theorganisation. When that happened, when humanresources was up for that, I knew things werestarting to turn in our favour. But even theheadhunter firm ended up having to go to NewYork to get the guy, to get the guy with thewriting skills, with the command of French andthe knowledge of finance that we were lookingfor.

So, great, nice. However, those translators– you know, the ones we want, the ones with thereally good writing skills actually, in myexperience, are the ones who tend to cause themost trouble and have the most problems withtheir internal clients. Why? Here I think no oneless eminent than Dr Samuel Johnson can help usout:

“When languages are formed upondifferent principles, it is impossible that thesame modes of expression should alwaysbe elegant in both. While they runtogether, the closest translation may beconsidered as the best; but when theydivaricate, each must take its naturalcourse”.– Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets

Isn’t divaricate wonderful? [Laughter]Now, lest you think my talk has not beensufficiently cultivating this afternoon, to DrJohnson I will add John Dryden:

“It appears necessary that a man shouldbe a nice critic is his own tongue before heattempts to translate a foreign language”.– John Dryden

I’m scaring you now, aren’t I? With all thisseventeenth and eighteenth century stuff. No

worries: my point is simple. It’s twofold butrelatively simple. First off, you can’t always sayexactly the same thing, in exactly the same way,and have it work exactly as well, in two differentlanguages. Even two languages as closely relatedas French and English, and I won’t mention 1066because I don’t want you all on my back.Sometimes of course you can, particularlybetween two languages as closely related asFrench and English, but sometimes you can’t.More times than I think the average translator isaware of. Sometimes, the two languages must, asDr Johnson put it, “divaricate”.

Second point, and here we lean on Drydena bit: in order to know when you should, as itwere, “divaricate”, you need a very strong senseof style in your target language. You need realexpertise. The kind of expertise that would allowyou to know, if your target language happens tobe English, that by “nice” a late 17th Centurywriter would have meant “refined”, someone withan exquisitely refined sensibility in English.

Now, it follows from this that translatorswith mediocre writing skills and a relativelyimpoverished sensibility in their target languageare actually generally going to be morecomfortable with closer translations. Their target-language stylistic compass isn’t quite pointingnorth anyway, so it’s more easily pulled in thedirection of the source text and the sourcelanguage. That’s the best metaphor I can comeup with. They don’t feel the need to “divaricate”as often as they should. And unfortunately, moreoften than not, the client – be she external orinternal – is happy with that, because clients like itwhen they find the structures and even the wordsof their original in the translation – they find itcomforting and reassuring.

Now, in contrast, translators who have areal feel for their target language are going tohave a harder time translating literally, or evenclosely. I would submit the hypothesis that theirmore acute sensibility in their target languagemakes them more painfully aware of how bad,how ineffective as communication a lot of “close”translation is.

So it’s that category of translator, the lattercategory of translator – the guys we want – whoare going to cause more trouble, because they’ll



be changing more stuff. It’s as simple as that. Andclients don’t like their stuff to get changed. Sothis needs to be managed.

So that’s another moving part in ourprocess at BCV – translators like this need facetime with their clients so they can explain whatthey’re doing and why. And also so that they canget any additional information they need to maketheir target text really work. And I’ll take the caseof French and English, as that’s the only languagecombination I know anything at all about. A goodtranslator, one who can write, is going to need alot more time and place information than she’slikely to have gotten from the original French textin many places, so she can turn some nouns intoverbs. Those of you who work in this field knowexactly what I’m talking about. And when shedoes that, she has to know what tenses andaspects to use and what agent to predicate allthose shiny new verbs of. You can’t get this unlessyou ask, so you’re not going to get this unlessyou have a Q&A-enabled client relationship. It’sthat simple. That way, our translator, our putativetranslator, can avoid literal renderings like this:

“The year 2008 was marked by passing theone billion Swiss francs revenue milestoneand by a fundamental transformation ofthe digital TV business of the Kudelskigroup.”

Now, this is a page 2 pull quote from the annualreport of a big Swiss tech company, so they haveclearly missed a chance to be impactful here in aplace where they should be impactful. They’vemissed a chance to sound dynamic. But if you askthem a couple of questions, maybe you can getto something like that:

“We generated revenues of CHF 1 billionfor the first time in 2008, andfundamentally transformed our digital TVbusiness model”.

This way, the company sounds more dynamic. It’lltalk about itself in the first person. It might createthat inclusive first and second person space thatAnglo companies use as a space to sell stuff. So,how do you get there? Well, face time is going to

be crucial to that. It’s of course also crucial, however, that the

client come out of that face time, that encounter,satisfied with what happened and convinced thatthe translator has added value to the project. Sothe translator is going to need meeting skills, forlack of a better term, skills that will allow her tolearn how to project the sort of expertise that willget those clients to buy in when you switch thingsaround.

So two key process elements that weneeded to build in at BCV were face time andtraining in meeting skills to make that face timepay off. Because while the actual quality of whatwe do – whether it reads well, whether it’saccurate – is very important, I think cruciallyimportant to all of us in terms of our ownpersonal job satisfaction, perceived quality is atleast equally important, maybe even moreimportant when you’re dealing with an in-houseteam and you’re trying to develop your owncorporate survival skills.

Now there’s a lot I could say aboutmanaging perceived quality but I don’t thinkthere’s time. But I want to circle back to this ideaof meetings and meeting skills and talk about thatjust for a second. I think translators are, on thewhole, pretty miserable at meetings. There aresome interesting reasons for this. I think there’s acertain selection bias in the population of peoplewho choose to become translators against folkswho like to put themselves out there. I meanthere’s a reason you didn’t become a writer butbecame a translator. And “putting yourself outthere” with ideas is part of working in a meeting.But anyway, let’s just take that as a given. At BCVwe feel it’s a given. But it’s not something thatyou can or should just ignore. This is stuff that canbe coached, that can be worked on. As Gurli said,the range of competences that’s necessary islarge. Meeting skills are part of it. At BCV,translators routinely walk into meetings withsenior management. I’m talking about a meetingbetween a translator and the CEO or the CFO ofa large listed company in Switzerland. Thosemeetings have got to be productive, because ifthey’re not they will not happen again.

Some of our senior management are nativespeakers of the languages concerned: our current



CFO is German, our previous head of wealthmanagement was a Brit. And in a meeting – let’stake the example of a meeting between one ofmy German translators and the German-languageCFO – it’s got to be clear from the very beginningin that meeting who the real German-languageexpert is. That’s just got to emerge. Concretely, ifthey’re working on a press release, like the one Ishowed you earlier and something doesn’t work –if the CEO says “No, no, I don’t think the Germanis saying what we said in French” and they startbrainstorming about it, then it’s absolutely crucialthat my guy be able, in real time, in the heat ofthe moment, to come up with more synonyms,more rephrasings, more reformulations, fasterthan the German-language CFO. Now I know it’snot real, it’s all about perception, but it’s soimportant, because the CFO is being paid to runthe bank; my guy is being paid to be theGerman-language specialist, and then if the CFOdecides “Oh, I’ve got to do that too”, then I’mgoing to have a big problem. So, this is a highlystressful situation for a translator. But it issomething that can be trained for, way up stream,and it’s something that can be prepared for, onlya little bit up stream, if you sit down beforehandas a college of German translators and say “OK,this is the press release, an image-critical text forus, it’s about our brand within the organisation,let’s think of alternatives for the tough bits”. Butyour boss has to be willing to let you, as it were,“waste that time”. So there we are back togeometrically more, exponentially more resourceson certain types of texts – not being afraid tostretch that, stretch your resource allocation atthe high end.

And when you think about it, BCV as abank is doing that too. BCV is willing to allocateCFO time to translations and CEO time totranslations. And senior management time israther more expensive than translator time. Sothat says something too. It might even be onereason why that doesn’t happen very often atlisted companies. You don’t have too manycompanies where the translators walk intomeetings with the CEO and CFO. It’s hard to getmeetings with these people. But honestly, I thinkanother reason in all modesty is that not many in-house teams have tried it. You know, they’ve not

tried to get in and not many in-house teams havetrained their people to ensure that, when thatmeeting happens once, the translator is going toget invited back, given that the man or woman onthe other side of the table is usually veryimpatient. So, you’ve got that going on too.

It took us about five years to get there. Weworked our way up through lower level meetings,and it was absolutely crucial that the people onthe other side of the table in those lower levelmeetings walked out of the meeting with theimpression that they understood why you hadmessed with their content – not only did theyunderstand it but they were also impressed withyour knowledge of their field, your commitmentto helping them attain their goals, yoursurprisingly deep understanding for those goals,in a world where a lot of business people say “Ah,les traducteurs, ce sont tous des poètes” –“Translators just don’t get it, they don’tunderstand business”.

This brings me to my last point, which isspecialisation, because specialisation is a big partof this. It’s another one of the moving parts in oursystem at BCV, but I think it’s something thateverybody here who’s looking to have a high-end,reasonably future-proofed career needs to takeseriously. It’s a basic fact of economic life: if yourknee hurts you might go to your GP and getsome Advil or something like that, but if it keepshurting you won’t go back to your GP, you go tothe orthopaedic surgeon. And if you need anoperation, you would do well to ask thatorthopaedic surgeon whether he’s really a knee



guy or a shoulder guy. So specialisation is outthere and we all know it, so it surprises mesometimes that so many translators think they geta free pass on this fundamental fact of economiclife. If you want to be in the premium market, youneed to specialise. I think translators are veryoften people who didn’t know what to “read” or“major in” at university, because everythinginterested them. I mean, I was like that. I think alot of us are like that. But you do have to makechoices, however much it hurts. The notedfinancial translator Christine Durban has said thatyou’re not a specialised financial translator unlessit’s something you’re doing 40 hours a week. Sothat means, for instance, that the 30% of my timeI spend at the University of Geneva is actuallyhaving a negative impact on my skills as afinancial translator, and it’s true: I’m not as goodas I could or perhaps should be. So if you want toget into the premium market, I would say that isthe first thing that you need to do.

So…my takeaways then for today – wewere asked to leave concrete takeaways, right?The first one then is that, contrary to the“Lamentations of the Jeremiah” ethos that I thinksome translator groups are sort of bathing in, thateverything is bad, with the bulk market, machinetranslation, etc., I would like to say that thepremium market is out there and is actuallygrowing. Its future doesn’t feel threatened to me.I would totally agree with Gurli there. Now, myvision, my view of this is necessarily veryoccluded, far more occluded than that of theother two speakers today. I’m just talking aboutone small slice and trying to give you a case studyof that and you’ll have to extrapolate from whatI’ve said and, I hope, see one or two things thatmight be applicable. But there are also otherpremium markets that are out there, like the EU’s.In many respects, they represent the pinnacle ofour profession. I kind of doubt that, contrary towhat I’ve said about how we work at BCV, at theEU translators should rewrite treaties to makethem sound better in the target language, but Idon’t know because I’m not specialised in thatand wouldn’t or shouldn’t presume to talk aboutit. If you could rewrite treaties in the targetlanguage, maybe we Swiss might one day signup. We are currently attempting to rewrite a

couple of treaties, as you may be aware. So thatwould be the first takeaway.

The second is that doing this, working inthe premium market in a relatively future-proofedsituation, is then predicated on attaining a veryhigh degree of specialisation. And I will leave thedoor open for a rebuttal by saying that thisdegree of specialisation is something that I thinkmany academics in translation studies areunaware of, simply by virtue of the fact that if youare a full-time academic you can’t do ChristineDurban’s 40 hours. And a corollary of this is thenthat, although I think translation MA programmesare fantastic and essential, and that they get bad-mouthed unfairly in trade conferences ofpractising translators like the one I just got backfrom in Brussels, you need to add other stuff tothem, because I think a lot of people in theseprogrammes aren’t going to be aware of thispremium market because they’re occupied withother things and those things prevent them fromobtaining the level of specialisation that isrequisite for working in the premium market. So Iwould say that.

Finally, two last things. As I said, working inthese markets is predicated on being anextremely gifted writer and editor and talker, as itwere a “cardiologist” in your native language.And the last thing is that it’s predicated on settingup dialogue-based processes with your clients. Irefer to them as “Q&A-enabled” or “give-and-take-enabled” processes. Now thinking about thisin terms of future-proofing is kind of interestingbecause it seems to me that if you do that, thenyour career as a translator or perhaps moreaccurately a translator/multilingual contentcreator or re-creator is relatively future-proof,because it’s unlikely that machines will be able tosit down and talk with their clients any time soon.And if I’m wrong about that one, then I thinktranslation will be the least of our problems.

Thanks very much.



Iwould like to start by saying thatit is a very, very great pleasure forme to be here today and how

much I have enjoyed the twopresentations which have preceded

me and, of course, that makes it difficult. I wasasked when I first arrived did I want to speak first?“No, I don’t think so.” I’m not so sure anymore!However, I’d like to thank the three co-organisersof this meeting for inviting me to participate andfor having the opportunity to share reflections,because what I want to do today is to share somereflections with you. And I think it’s anotherexample of just how good the DGT in particular isat acting as a catalyst, as we heard in the firstpresentation, because perhaps my initialreflection is we need to do more of this if we areall going to fulfil the various different missionsthat we have in future-proofing the profession, inequipping the next generation of translators. So,that to me would be my initial point. And I foundit interesting that each of us has started, or I amabout to start, by explaining a little bit aboutwhere we’re coming from. Now, that to me isprobably a very good indication that we are veryaware that we don’t really know each other aswell as perhaps we should. Now I think that againis one of my major reflections today.

So, where am I coming from? I’m comingfrom the much maligned world of universitytranslator training. I received translator trainingmyself as an undergraduate here in the UnitedKingdom and then I have built my professionalcareer in translator training in Spain. So againthere, having gone through Switzerland briefly, sowe have Geneva in common David. So, I’mcoming from the world of translator training atuniversity level; I’m coming from the world ofresearch into translator training – so how best dowe help young people to become potentialtranslators? And I’ll come back perhaps to that alittle a little later on; I’m coming from the very,

very positive initial experience of the EMT project– the European Master’s in Translation – which hasbeen mentioned before and which of coursemany of you are familiar with and which to mymind, independently, irrespectively of the detailof the content and the details of implementation,was a wonderful opportunity for the academicworld and the professional world – the majortranslation service in Europe – to sit downtogether and talk for hours – and I havecolleagues here (Christina and Angeliki), whoshared this wonderful experience with me – totalk together for hours and hours, over a periodof almost three years about what we were doing,why we were doing it, whether we were doing theright thing and how much we could learn fromeach other. And that, as I said, I think is absolutelyessential.

I’m coming from there. I’m also comingfrom the very great privilege of having been ableto spend the last seven years of my professionallife a little bit further away from translation, andyou may well say “Oh, so you’re not a specialist –you’ve moved too far away”, but in actual fact thelast seven years of my academic life as Vice-Rector, as someone very, very situated inuniversity policy making, have helped me a greatdeal to understand how universities as institutionstick, why they tick as they do. I’m not surewhether that’s the pulse level of cardiology –mixed metaphors, I’m not very good at beingconsistent with my metaphors – but again I’mcoming from there and I think this is important,because if we are to understand each other weneed to know where the bank is coming from, weneed to know where the academic institution iscoming from. And although most of myprofessional life has been in Spain, so I’mparticularly familiar with southern Europeanuniversity systems, I was trained in the UK and Ialso have the privilege currently of chairing aEuropean network of universities, many of

Dorothy Kelly – University of Granada



which – the Coimbra group of universities – havevery, very prestigious translator trainingprogrammes: Geneva, Heidelberg, Edinburgh,Bologna, Turku and so on. So, quite a mix ofapproaches here.

Now, I do have a presentation. We wereasked to address three main questions. We havein addressing them, very interestingly, all three ofus gone back in history. We’ve had Johnson andDryden, we’ve had Saint Jerome and here wehave - for those of you who are not familiar withthis translator – Judah Ibn Tibbon, who is aJewish, medieval translator and that statue is inthe city of Granada, which is why I thought Iwould share it with you today. Granada was oneof the seats of a lot of the transmission ofknowledge, which went through translation in theMiddle Ages, with the intervention of both Jewishand Arab translators, and I do like to use it as anillustration.

So we were asked to deal with threedifferent questions and what I have done in mypresentation is really to run through each of them.I don’t know if that’s an academic way of goingabout it or not but that’s what I’ve done.

I’m going to start with question one butvery interestingly I’m going to do something verysimilar to what Gurli did: I’m going to deconstructthe question a little bit. The first question is “Aretranslators being trained to meet the futureexpectations of work providers and users oftranslation services?”

OK, I think very often that when thatquestion is formulated in that way theexpectation is probably that we’re going to sayno, isn’t it? To a certain extent, I felt there was alot of pressure there to answer no and, of course,I resist that pressure. So I started to look at thequestion in a little bit more depth and one of thefirst things that I came up with was this verb“train”, which is in academic circles a verycontroversial verb. To train is considered to besomething that belongs to vocational education;it is not considered to be something thatuniversities should be involved in. Universitieseducate; they do not train. It is an interestingdebate. I won’t go into a great deal of depthabout it but it does have implications for thespecialisation debate.

The second issue was where are translatorstrained or educated and why? Of course, here Ithink that there is a need for much greater, shallwe say, diversity. For some reason, in translatoreducation, universities are expected to producetotally and utterly fit-for-purpose translators theday after they receive their degree. Now, I havealways found this a very, very unfair expectation.And it is not an expectation of the law faculties; itis not an expectation of the medicine faculties,and I would certainly not want to put myself inthe hands of a cardiologist who had only receivedher degree yesterday.So, the whole issue of specialisation is somethingwe really need to reflect on. Universities areproducing future translators. They are producingpeople with the initial competences and I thinkGurli has been through a very, very interesting listthere of competences and perhaps as co-author Iwill allow myself to say that what I found mostinteresting about your review of competenceswere not the EMT translator competences but theothers. And the others are of course somethingthat we at university are trying very, very hard towork on.

Then of course, the question as it is posedbegs the following question: what are and whodefines the future expectations of work providersand users of translation services? We’re nottalking about today’s expectations – futureexpectations. So not only do we want universitiesto produce specialised experts who are capableof doing the top-end level of the job the day afterthey get their degree, but we are expectinguniversities to know what I suspect the workproviders and users of translation services do notknow, i.e. what are the future expectations? Nowwe’re supposed to know this when we designcurricula, which if they are undergraduate last forthree or four years, if they are Master’sprogrammes last for one or two years dependingon our context, and then they’re supposed towork, after we’ve had time to design this, have itapproved, set it up and actually have the firstgraduates. Now that is pretty tough. So, there isan increasing pressure on universities to producewhat I think is practically the impossible. And Ithink we should say this as academic institutionsand I don’t think we should be afraid of saying it.



There are, quite apart from translationpressures on translator trainers, of course thereare huge, huge pressures on universities ingeneral in society today, to do more, in less time,for less money. You will all be familiar with this. It’snot only universities who are suffering this ofcourse but we are not exempt, we are not exemptfrom that. Nor are we exempt from interventionof all kinds by public authorities and by theprivate sector. And we are supposed to be ableto do all of this, be on the top of the rankings andgenerally be world class. Now, again, I think weneed a touch of realism here. I think and I wouldpostulate that, in fact, if we look at all theseenormous pressures and we compare ourselveswith other disciplines across the board, translationstudies or whatever we want to call our disciplinehas actually done pretty well. That would be oneof my base points.

So, what is the role of universities in thetraining of professionals? It’s more or less whatI’ve been trying to discuss with you today. Andwhat is the situation in universities in Europetoday? I will just stop briefly at that point to makea couple of general points, which of course haveto affect translation studies also. And that is, thatuniversities, as I said, the world over are underthis continuous pressure, under this very, verystrong pressure from public authorities, fromfunding authorities and from the employers of ourgraduates. But we are also, in the case of Europe– I’m not really very sure whether to include theUK in this particular case – I am going to say weare in the throes of what is again a much

maligned process, the Bologna process, of reformof higher education in Europe – and I say I’m notsure whether to include the UK, those of you whowork in the UK academic institutions will of coursehelp me with this, but when we have ourmeetings at European level and all the Europeanrepresentatives are terribly concerned about whatis happening in Bologna most of the UKrepresentatives seem to be blissfully unaware andterribly unconcerned about the Bologna processand what it has meant, possibly because the UKwas almost there anyway when it started.

Why am I speaking about the Bolognaprocess to a group of people who are reallyinterested in the translation profession and thefuture of the translation profession? Well, becausethe Bologna process has changed universities andI think that if we are to work together and if weare to get to know each other well enough towork productively together, then it is veryimportant for not only universities but society ingeneral (employers, professional associations,etc.) also to understand what the Bolognaprocess has meant for universities. It has meant avery, very clear agenda that we should respondmore to social needs. Now I’m going to say socialand not market because the market is part ofsociety and the needs universities must attend toare much broader than purely market needs.There are others also. This awareness issomething which has permeated and haspervaded curricula design in universities over thepast few years, the past decade more or less –the Bologna process ostensibly began in 1999.

Now I’m not going to go into the details ofwhat I believe are 47 different Bologna processesdepending on the national context that you arein, but I do believe that that element is important.But I also believe that translation studies, and thishas been discussed by many specialists intranslator training, were in fact Bologna compliantbefore Bologna ever existed. I do believe that ifyou read the literature on translator training youwill see that there has always been an awarenessof the world out there, of what we would like ourgraduates to be able to do and why. I think that’simportant. It’s also important because in many,many countries, the Bologna process has implied,has meant, a division of university education into



cycles (first cycle, second cycle, third cycle, i.e.Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral level), which ofcourse in the UK is pretty standard and we’re allvery, very familiar with, but for many, manytranslator training institutions across Europe thishas been a major, major issue and has led toconsiderable reflection on what to do. At whichlevel should translator training, translatoreducation, be situated? Should it be first cycleundergraduate programmes? Should it be secondcycle Master’s programmes? And how openshould they be and how specialised should theybe? There’s an awful lot of heart searching thatgoes on there. And then what is the role ofcourse of the third cycle and research training inthe field of translation? These are all issues thatuniversities have been dealing with.

There seems to be fairly strong consensusthat translator education should in general besituated at the Master’s level. Now I say fairlygeneral consensus speaking as a professor at auniversity in Spain where there are 23 – possiblymore because we lose count – undergraduateprogrammes in translation. And this happens alsoof course in many other countries. I believe – andI think it is important for us as academicinstitutions to look very carefully at what we do – Ibelieve that is a mistake. I believe that what isnecessary at undergraduate level is a much moregeneral approach to communication, tointerlingual communication, to interculturalcommunication, and that the more specialisedtranslation skills should come at second cycle. I’mnot sure however they quite reach the degree ofspecialisation that David was talking to us about,nor can I say do I believe they necessarily shouldand I think that’s important, because I think thatafter graduation there is an awful lot of trainingthat happens: there’s a lot of self-training thathappens, there’s a lot of in-house training –formal and informal in-house training – and Ibelieve that should always exist.

The second question and I’ll be quite quickon this one perhaps is “Are they equipped withthe skills they need to deal intelligently withtechnological change?” Now, basically, I thinkhere my message is that the demands coming toacademic institutions from the language industryare very often incredibly short-termist in this

respect. We hear things like “Well, the translatorneeds to be able to sit down on day one and beable to use this particular software” and again Iwon’t name names. I don’t think that’s true. I thinkthe translator needs to be able to work withsoftware for translation but not necessarily withone particular platform, not necessarily with theparticular version of that particular platform whichthis particular translation agency is using. Thetranslator, the new translation graduate, needs tobe aware of what kind of software is available,needs to be able to critically use that softwareand needs to be aware of the impact of the use ofthe software on their translation decision-makingprocesses.

And here I come back to the translator asan expert, and I think David your discussion of theface-to-face meetings with the CFO and CEO – Ibelieve that’s a major, major skill: interpersonalskills, the ability to act as an expert at the samelevel with other experts in other fields, the abilityto justify translation decisions is something thatuniversities need to work on a little bit more. But Ido actually know that we are working on theseskills and that a lot of our methodology in theclassroom is based on helping our students tojustify their decisions. Now that to me is anessential, an absolutely essential skill. Now that’sone of the things that I just want to say: I believethat the role of universities then in equippingtranslators with skills has to go back to basics.And I’m not using the term as it was used by aBritish politician at one point. We are responsiblefor the essentials of translator competence. Ifthose essentials aren’t there, the rest doesn’treally matter, because it can’t work. So we needto be sure that we are giving the essentials oftranslator competence. And I won’t go into theactual content of those competences becauseGurli has already mentioned them earlier.

We also need to be sure, however, that weare developing these generic skills: theinterpersonal skills, the ability to analyse, theability to act as an expert and justify one’s owndecisions and professional performance. And ofcourse this has to link in to the world in which welive, because the world in which we live is a worldwhich is changing much, much faster than it everhas at any point in history. And we’ve all gone



back to history, but we all know that progress andchange was much, much slower if we go back toSaint Jerome and we move into the Middle Agesand we come forward, today, change is so, so fastthat it is very, very difficult and here I’m not 100%sure of whether I agree with Gurli: are we trainingpeople for a profession of a lifetime, howevermuch that profession evolves and we evolve withit? I suspect that today’s world in fact requires thatits academic institutions help people to be ableto learn, to evolve and to adapt, rather than to fitinto a slot which they will then maybe not moveout of.

I think that’s essential for us also – theadaptability, the flexibility, the ability to learn, theability to analyse, the ability to reflect. Now, thatneeds time. Reflection needs time. Again, weneed to build that time into our curriculumdesign. It needs time and it needs experience.We can’t expect a 23-year-old graduate to beable to reflect and analyse the same way thatmost of us analyse and reflect.

“What part can academic institutions,professional bodies and internationalorganisations play in preparing new and currentpractitioners for the challenges facing theprofession?” I think to a certain extent I haveanswered some of those questions. I havehighlighted “academic institutions” because thatis where I am coming from and where I feelauthorised to speak. What can we do? We canmake sure that our curricula design is reflective,analytical and takes account of its context. Itscontext is multiple; it is not only the languageindustry. But we need to make sure that we takethat context into account. And of course we needto make sure that that curricula design allows usto promote generic competences, transferablecompetences. There are all sorts of researchissues around the whole theme of transferableskills and what does transfer mean and how isknowledge transferred. I won’t go into that today.But simply, the ability to act as a critical andaware citizen in a very, very complex world today.To me those are the essential, generic skills.

We need to be in constant contact with theprofession, with the professions perhaps I shouldsay, but the professions in the broadest sense: notjust the industry but also the associations, the

professionals themselves. And a very, very usefulway that many of us find of being in contact withthe professions is through our own graduates,which is where we find out whether what we aredoing is actually working, because they can comeback and say “Hey, you know, it’s great becausewhat we learnt with you is just what we wanted,just what we needed” or they can come back andsay “Oh what a disaster! Really, nothing that wedid in the classroom has been of any usewhatsoever”. Normally they come somewhere inbetween: “this was great … this wasn’t so useful”.

But then of course each person’s individualexperience post university is different and wehave to put them all together, because one of theother conditions which we as universities have towork under is that we of course have to serve thewhole society. We can’t just serve the very, very,very top end. But we need to bring professionsinto our reflections on curricula design, on theevaluation of our curricula and how we enhancethose curricula. We need of course to bring instaff from the professional world of translation. Iwill say what I always say here when people say“Yes, you need to get professionals in”. Wait aminute, we are all professionals but we’re allprofessionals of different things. Yes, universitiesneed to have professionals from the world oftranslation come in on a full-time, on a part-timebasis, permanently, temporarily, short term, longterm, yes, but universities also need professionaleducators. And I would please plea that we donot forget that. Universities are educators, that’swhat we’re there for.



There’s an awful lot going on and I’m notgoing to go into any detail but there are hugeinnovations in translator education methodologyat our universities. There are many, many, manyforms of simulation of professional environmentsin the classroom, outside the classroom, withauthentic commissions and so on. I believe this issomething that we need to continue to do, thatI’m sure we can improve on, probably with yourhelp, but this is something which does alreadyexist. Sometimes we don’t get that messageacross very well. We’re not very good atmarketing in universities. We’re not very good atall at marketing in universities.

We need – and we need your help for this– we need to make sure that we have meaningfuland productive internships on our programmes.Now, I will say that this is a criticism we oftenreceive: “You’re not offering enough internships”.But in actual fact it’s not the universities who offerthe internships; it’s the language industry thatoffers the internships. And we know it’s time-consuming and costly and it gets in the way, but ifyou want us to offer a better education we needyou to work with us in this and I think that is alsoan important message. And of course I won’t gointo the detail of other minor aspects, such as sitevisits and so on. The other two areas – and I willnot go into any detail on either of them – whereof course universities can also participate, help,support, is in continuous professionaldevelopment. This is something that universitiesin some national contexts do extremely well. It isalso something that universities in other nationalcontexts do very badly. And I will say that thesouth of Europe is not particularly good at thisbut I believe the north of Europe is in fact prettygood on continuous professional development.And then of course in the research, becauseuniversities don’t only teach. Universities havetwo major missions and I won’t go into the otherthird and fourth missions. They have two majormissions: education and research. And of coursethe research that can be done at universities canalso feed into better education, better knowledgeof where things are going which might help us topredict the future a little better – a little better. Ithink we should always be very, very careful whenwe’re predicting the future. So we can do

research into the market, the professions, thereception of translations – this is interesting fromthe quality point of view. What is quality?Perceived quality. I think quality is alwaysperceived. I don’t think there’s any intrinsic qualityas such. You know, for a lot of people, GoogleTranslate gives them what they want. Well, isthere necessarily anything wrong with that? So,reception of translations, technologies,terminology and training. We do a lot of researchinto how to improve our training.

This would bring me to my takeaways,which are not on a slide, but I think my major,major takeaway is that we need morecooperation, we need to know each other betterand we need to work together more and better.And I think with that I shall say thank you.


Panel discussion 26

RG: Now this second half of the afternoon is where you get to talk, just in case youthought it was just going to be all of us. We have Iwan Davies: Iwan has been a freelancetranslator for 15 years and he’s currently, and most importantly for us today, Chairman ofthe Institute of Translation and Interpreting, which is the UK’s only dedicated professionalassociation for practising translation and interpreting professionals. Welcome to Iwan.

Next to him is Robert Capurro, born and brought up in Bogotá, Robert also studied in the UK, atKing’s School Canterbury and King’s College London. Now Robert has mostly had a career ininternational corporate insurance broking, and he’s had all kinds of senior management positionsbased in various European countries and in Santiago in Chile. So, you’re going to be talking mainlyfrom the insurance, multinational translation area.

RC: Indeed, and also from a Canning House perspective, which promotes Spanish andPortuguese language and culture.

RG: And you’ve been at Canning House since 2013.

RC: Yes, just under a year.

RG: Well, welcome to you as well. Jane Martens, who is wearing my favourite colour – red. How didyou know? Really great to meet Jane. We’ve also just discovered that we were both brought up partlyin Zimbabwe, which is great. Now Jane lives in Germany, and I’ve lived in Germany for a long timetoo, and Jane comes at it more from a legal translation perspective. What are you doing at themoment?

Panellists, L-R:

ID: Iwan Davies – Chair, Institute of Translation & InterpretingRC: Robert Capurro – Canning House, Hispanic & Luso Brazilian CouncilJM: Jane Martens – Chartered Linguist (Translator)KM: Keith Moffitt – Chair, Chartered Institute of LinguistsRG: Rosie Goldsmith – Panel discussion moderator DK: Dorothy Kelly – University of Granada DJ: David Jemielity – Banque Cantonale Vaudoise/Uni versity of GenevaGH: Gurli Hauschildt – EC Directorate-General for T ranslation


Panel discussion 27

JM: I work for a major German law firm, I’m a Chartered Linguist, and have 25 years ofexperience working for banks, for law firms, universities and the US Department ofJustice, so that’s where my background comes from. And always having a legalspecialisation has been a great benefit.

RG: And Keith Moffitt in the middle there. We’re very, very pleased to have Keith on the panel as well,the Chartered Institute of Linguists’ Chair since 2012 and also a freelance translator and managementconsultant. Which languages are yours?

KM: French, German and Portuguese. I did a degree in French and German and 24 yearsago I acquired a Brazilian partner and I thought I’d better learn Portuguese at that point.

RG: Where did you do French and German?

KM: At Salford, which is sad story, because the language department is closing down.

RG: Now, we’re going to try and rattle through ten questions, and we are really going to try and getsomething out of this. It’s going to be as dynamic as we can possibly make it. Now the first questioncomes from Lourdes Melción.

Lourdes: Dorothy, you’ve touched quite a lot on that already, I work at a university as well and havebeen involved in this area of translation and one of the things we are really concerned about is whatsteps can be taken to ensure that academic institutions, professional bodies and internationalorganisations work collaboratively to prepare translators?

DJ: Well, Dorothy and I have a bit of debate going on about this, so maybe I’ll circleback to that. First off, to say that I completely agree, it’s absolutely ridiculous to supposethat somebody should get out of a translation studies degree, like, plug-and-play. Imean, I have an intern who did a translation studies degree with us and her thesis withme at the University of Geneva and came to the bank, and you start kind of from scratch

with those people. And she wants to be a lawyer or legal translator so she is now at Harvard Lawfinishing up and she will go to her law firm and she also will not know how to practise law, and that isright and proper. So we have to start by stopping the incessant slamming of the academic translationstudies programmes that goes on among the practitioners. I find it particularly ironic when I hear it attrade conferences, because very many of those practitioners waste our time by being a little bittheoretically naive, and by not having the sort of vocabulary, the meta-vocabulary, that you can learnin a translation studies programme to talk precisely and economically about what you’re doing. Sothat’s the first thing I would say. And then if you allow me to get a little bit more long-winded on thispart…

RG: Briefly long-winded!

DJ: Yes, OK! What I’m trying to say about specialisation is this: I think it is very important that, on thefaculties of translation studies, MA programmes, that there be people who are at the pinnacle of theirprofession, the high end, and, as I said, you need to be specialised to do that, so, as Dorothymentioned, translation studies MA programmes will bring in practitioners. However, there’s a bit of aproblem there, because the rub is that very often they are offering those guys forty-five pounds anhour, or something like that, and that runs head-up against a fundamental economic concept calledopportunity cost. Anyone who is any good is probably not going to take that teaching job, or else it


Panel discussion 28

will be someone like Robin Bonthrone, who is coming to London to teach for that amount because hefeels like he owes something to the profession and the university programme concerned, which I willnot name, is very lucky to have Robin. But luck is not a business model. So something needs to bedone there.

RG: Jane, you were nodding there, I think you feel very strongly about that.

JM: That’s right. I have the advantage of a legal training, and so the subject ofspecialisation is very important. As I live in Germany and there is a great emphasis onformal qualifications, I was very happy to get a diploma in translation later and then todo the state examination to be a sworn translator in Germany for the Berlin courts andnotaries. But that’s a very practical way of acquiring the knowledge; I didn’t do a

translation degree. I would be very happy to go back at the invitation of a translation department at auniversity and help to give a practical view on that. I think most of us agree that would’ve been a help,perhaps, to those people who have studied translation at university, and we’ve discovered thatspecialisation, within the law as well, is one element of it. But, for example, our lawyers have a lot toteach us too in our legal translation department about the way lawyers work, what they expect, sothere’s a lot of client expectation input as well which would be very helpful at university level ifstudents who are studying translation, whether it’s at a Bachelor’s or a Master’s level, had an idea ofwhat’s going to be expected of them at the end. I think everyone would be better off for that.

RG: And that’s what Dorothy was talking about actually in her presentation, I’m sure that you agreewith that. Keith, how do you feel about this question, because I know you have some views on it aswell.

KM: I think I was trying to have a bit of a reality check and remember that probably thevast majority of translators these days emerging from translating or language coursesend up working as freelancers; I was very lucky, I did a degree at Salford, I spent eightmonths working as an intern for Siemens in Munich and I then got a full-time job workingfor the National Coal Board. Anybody remember the National Coal Board? In the

glorious days of the European Coal and Steel Community they had quite a big translatingdepartment, so I had all those benefits, but I’m very much aware that the people I deal with now veryoften are going straight into the world of freelance translation, so we’ve been saying, you emergefrom courses at the point where you’re starting to learn your profession, but actually these people arenow learning as freelancers, which is very difficult, so I think we need to be thinking about CPD, andnobody has mentioned mentoring today, we’ve talked about internships, but for freelancers,mentoring is hugely important.

RG: With all the troubles of freelance life, in addition to starting off in a profession, which still isn’t asstructured as it should be and could be.

KM: Exactly, I think mentoring programmes also need to be structured if they are going to beintroduced. I don’t think that’s something you should be just chucked in at the deep end and told“Can you mentor this person?”, because I started doing it and found out this person thought theywere going to become my very best friend, and it was quite difficult, but…

RG: “And, reader, he married her!”

KM: In fact, not! I think my Brazilian male partner would have thought that very strange!


Panel discussion 29

RG: Can I pass on to Robert?

RC: I agree with what the panel has said so far and perhaps going directly to thequestion in terms of professional associations or professional bodies and internationalorganisations, with my insurance broking hat on, I was a member of the CharteredInsurance Institute and I can see a lot of value in academia coordinating with bodies likethe Chartered Institute of Insurance, so that there might be modules that are taken by

translators in insurance so that then people have some technical expertise in a particular field beyondtranslation when they leave and they can begin the process of specialisation. Insurance in its own rightis increasingly specialised, not only the traditional division between marine hull and aviation andgeneral property, for example, and liabilities, but increasingly within each of those branches, certainlyat the front end, what we call the retail end, insurance brokers are required to know their clients’businesses inside out, so you have people who specialise in water utilities, or business-to-businessoutsourcing companies, so I think the translation profession would do well to follow that trend, andthe sooner it is started, the easier it will be.

RG: That is something that David brought up in his presentation, about specialising in a premiumarea.

RC: I believe so, yes. I endorse that.

RG: So we move now to the second question, and Paul Ratcliffe. So Paul Ratcliffe’s question, whichagain is representative of the questions you sent in. “Are translation services users ‘trained’ andcompetent to commission translation work? Do we adequately understand their future expectations,technically, qualitatively, or otherwise: how can the profession contribute to shaping them?” And we’llstart with Iwan on that one.

ID: Thank you. I’m one of those freelancers that Keith was referring to, hence the lack ofneckwear here today – conspicuous by its absence, I think! But, as a freelancer, obviously,I’m driven by commercial imperative. I need to put food on the table and pay themortgage each month and it seems to me then that the commercial aspect here is thatthis question is all about procurement, it’s all about the procurement process, and the

procurement process in translation doesn’t work. Because the client isn’t wanting to buy a translation,they’re actually wanting to buy a communication solution. They’re wanting to solve a communicationsneed. Now, that communication need can be solved by translation, it could be solved by gisting, itcould be solved by interpreting. But it’s a communications need that needs resolving. You can’t selltranslation because the client doesn’t want to buy it, so you have to sell communication solutions. Soyou need to work with the client to actually differentiate, as David was saying earlier, to differentiatetheir expectations, to explain to them what the difference is between premium translation and ‘bulk’translation, if you like. For clients, very often, translation equals translation: there is no differentiation.So our job as professionals is to make that distinction much clearer. We need to explain to them whatwriting for translation is all about, so the copy that they provide to us, as you’ve alluded to, Paul, is fitfor purpose, is ready to be translated. And in case we are in any doubt as to whether some peoplealready get this idea that premium translation and professional translation is important: there was anarticle on the blog of PC Pro magazine on Wednesday telling us that cyber criminals are now usingprofessional translators to translate spam because people recognise Google-translated spam.Whether this is true or not, I hope not. Whether any ITI members are involved in it, I sincerely hopenot. It would in any case breach our code of professional conduct, which says that it’s…


Panel discussion 30

RG: Maybe it’s very well paid!

ID: Well, maybe it is but it still breaches the code of conduct! So it’s clear that these people haveunderstood that the need for translation can be measured in terms of opportunities and risks. Theopportunity for them, to get translation right, is massive: they can spam more people, they can sellmore Viagra, or whatever it is they are selling. On the other hand, the risk of an insurance company ora bank getting a translation wrong is massive on its share price and on its shareholder value, so this iswhat we have to convince our clients of.

RG: Gurli, can I turn to you: back to that question, are translation services users trained andcompetent to commission translations? What’s been your experience?

GH: Well, first and foremost, we should not underestimate our customers, certainly notwhere I work, I think very many Commission officials outside DG Translation and peoplein the other institutions with whom we cooperate are perfectly well placed to commissiontranslation work. But that’s a specific case, even if we look inside, in our case, they maynot always able to evaluate which is the specific product they need. We also do have a

diversified the range of offers, and especially if we speak of our English Department, one thing iswhen we translate a legislative text, those are mostly translated from English into other languages,because they are very often drafted in (not always perfect) English, but they are drafted in English. Butour English Department is asked to draft a lot of reports and other implementation proof fromMember States relating to the whole range of EU policies, and in some cases a DG may need a 100%human translation of everything, in another case they might just need to be able to understand thecontent in order to pick out the few pages where they would need a full translation. As we havelimited resources, of course we pass on the messages to our customers that we can help you muchbetter on other needs if you allow us to help you define what your needs are. In this specific case it’s avery important message to send, without underestimating their ability to see themselves.

RG: Thanks very much. Jane Martens?

JM: Yes, I’d like to make my contribution to adecent answer for you. I think ‘No’, generally. Alot of customers who come, a lot of clients, arecommissioning a translation for the first time.Many of them don’t know where to look, that’swhere an institution like the Chartered Instituteof Linguists or in Germany the Bundesverbandder Dolmetscher und Übersetzer have a veryreal contribution to make, because they listalongside with specialisations and languagescombinations and that can be a starting pointfor somebody who has no idea. But I think atleast half the responsibility is ours: it is ourresponsibility to take the hand of a client likethat and explain to them what the value is, whythey need us. That means commitment on ourpart, it’s not just a document that is translated and sent back. It means asking questions, requestingbackground information, being available for a telephone answer to a short question which may not bepaid, but you’re establishing a relationship of trust, and I think that’s the most important thing of all,


Panel discussion 31

so that they have a choice of twenty translators but they’ll always come back to you because theyknow that they can trust you to help them, even in a difficult situation, even if it’s something that isunpaid or unusual, whereas if you take the time to invest in that client relationship, it always pays off,even if not in money straight away, in the long term, definitely.

RG: Thank you very much indeed for that. As far as I understand, the ITI and CIOL, youhave lists of translators, don’t you? Of course you do, and I’m sure that’s growing, andbecoming more a more useful with each year. So, OK, we’ll move onto our third questionand Chris Keen: “Given that machine translation is here to stay, how does the panelsuggest that translators can best prepare for and indeed take advantage of the

opportunities presented by post-editing?”, which is an adjunct, I suppose, to the rest of the question.David, if you’d be kind enough to start on that one. Do you use machines?

DJ: I think you need to keep an open mind. I cast myself back to the early 2000s, when aguy who’s actually sitting in this room and his colleague twisted my arm and convincedme to start using translation memory: so we got shared databases, et cetera. And I thinkhow dumb I would be now if as head of an internal translation team I wasn’t usingtranslation memory. Now, translation memory has serious downsides – we all know that. I

mean sometimes you see when someone starts using it, because all of a sudden her paragraphs don’tflow any more, or whatever, and these things need to be managed. But still, if you’re in charge of aninternal team, and you’re not using translation memory – I mean, if you have an internal team, bydefinition there is some repetitive work – you are a drag on your corporation’s productivity. And Iwould not have recognised that ten or twelve years ago – my colleagues Dylan and Chris had to twistmy arm about it. So I would say the first thing you need to do is keep an open mind, be clear-headed,take a look at it. And you might decide “this is not the segment of the market in which I wish towork.” But don’t dismiss it.

RG: Thank you. And Gurli, as the one panellist who does use it, yes, justify yourself!

GH: I’m surprised, now, do I need to justify it? DG translation is actually developingmachine translation for two purposes: we develop machine translation to enable ourcustomers to gist documents to see if it is of a character that they would need to havetranslated in order to get a good picture of one or the other Member State, for instance,which we would like to obtain. It’s very important to be able to sift out what we could

consider the low-end demand which is unduly taking up human translation resources so that thehuman translation resources can concentrate on what is very important for the customer. And we haveto be customer-oriented. That’s one purpose.

Another purpose is as support for the translator himself. And I’m convinced that for somelanguage combinations it is already a very big support. There is not one answer to whether it is anadded value: it depends on the language combination, it depends on the text you’re going totranslate; is it a type of text with which the engines were trained? If not, it’s not useful. If you take anyordinary text which has nothing to do with the Commission’s working range, Google Translate or Bingor whatever will do much better than our machine translation system. If you take a legislative text or atext which is closely related to a legislative text in the EU institutions, we will produce a better result,because that’s what we are good at. On the interface of our translators: we will obviously get thematches from the translation memories. We use CAT tools, of course we do. When translatinglegislation, CAT tools have the beautiful added value of ensuring legal consistency across texts, andwe do it in 24 languages. There’s no way around it, we have to do it. Alongside these matches, and Ithink in another colour at least, in a way that is very easy to distinguish the two types of input to the


Panel discussion 32

translator, the translator gets the bit of our machine translation system, which is trained with the high-quality translations of our own translators in the domains of activity of the Commission, and they canpick out, the person, I don’t think it is easy, the question is, how can we make the best of it. I think it’slike going to the beach, and looking for amber. I don’t know if you ever tried that: if you go to thebeach and look for amber, the first hundred thousand times, you find something which is amber-coloured, you have to bite it to see, is this amber, or is it merely amber-coloured stone? Mostly,unfortunately, it’s just a stone. With training, over the years, you will be able to see which are the realpieces of amber on your beach without biting them. This is the investment it takes.

RG: That’s excellent. I mean, there is no for and against in this thing – I mean, you’re talking aboutthem complementing each other. Is there any strong feeling in the audience?

Audience member: I think there is a contradiction between the two speakers. David was talking aboutmachine translation as a programme, and Gurli about machine memory. They are two different things.I use Trados a lot, it’s not machine translation.

GH: We have both…

Audience member: I think a lot of translators, especially the newcomers, don’t know the difference.Everybody says “machine translation, machine translation”. One thing is a machine translationprogramme, and another thing is a machine translation memory. A memory – the translation buildsup, depending on the…

RG: Thank you very much, I’m sorry we can’t spend too long, but what is clear to me, from what you’resaying too, is that this is an incredibly important subject and there is not enough known about it inpublic. We should all be discussing it.

Second audience member: I’m a freelance translator and former colleague of Gurli’s as well. There’s alittle bit we need to add about Google Translate, which is different from translation memory or puremachine translation – it’s probabilistic, statistically what it does is it trawls the Internet and to see thepossibility of whether a source text has been translated by a particular target text, and I, as a freelancetranslator use a mix of everything. I’m all for replacing technology, even in the 30 years that I’ve beenworking, technology has increased my productivity, but has been a downward pressure on the prices Icommand.

RG: Thank you for that, I’m just going to get finally, Dorothy, a quick comment from you:


Panel discussion 33

DK: Just to say that many translator training programmes have already incorporatedmodules on machine translation and post-editing and I think that is a good sign that ouracademic programmes are in fact very up-to-date with what is being looked for.

RG: I think there needs to be a conference on machine translation, or computer-assistedtranslation. Thank you very much for that. We have our fourth question. Ewelina Krok? Ewelina: I’m a freelance translator of German and English into Polish. How can translators manageclients’ expectations in a world shaped by fast-changing technology and innovation? How can wedifferentiate our services from those offered by other colleagues, taking into account this fast-changing technology, and how can we communicate this message to the clients, to justify our rates?

RG: That’s lots of questions, and they are all good! We’re going to try and boil it down to, probably,David, a quick comment on that, and then Robert.

DJ: I’ll say something that is maybe almost insultingly basic for a lot of people here: youcan bill by the hour. Let me unpack that. What I mean is, think about trying to build clientrelations where, if you are a premium market translator, you want to get yourself into thementality of someone like a lawyer or a consultant, where it’s normal to bill by the hour.But also, project yourself into the shoes of a buyer, a guy like me, who hates not to have

visibility about how much it’s going to cost, and then try to split the difference. That means gettinggood at estimating, and swallowing it when you underestimate how much of your time it’s going totake. But you will build trust that way. I have freelancers, again including one sitting here in this room,who will tell me “Look, by the word it would have been x, but as a matter of fact I whipped through itso in fact it’s going to be x minus n”. I mean you have no idea how warm and fuzzy that makes mefeel.

RC: I think this is the question I find the most interesting because as a non-translator –perhaps I should have made that clear to you: I am not a translator – I take theprofessional services model, which boils down to its bare minimum, and building on thepremise that people buy people, which is a truism, but it’s certainly true in banking andinsurance broking – the product may be dry but they buy the people – the holy grail of a

professional services provider is to be the trusted advisor of their client, and that is what David wasalluding to: get yourself in under the skin of the business. They know their business; they don’t knowhow to procure translation but they sure as hell know where their business is going and what theirbusiness is about, so take the time, spend the time with them, in their businesses, embed yourself,become the trusted advisor, and then they will trust you to apply your translation skills. I think that isthe fundamental part, and is as soon as you are a trusted adviser, to a very great degree, price goesout of the window. You can’t charge what you like, but you can charge a fair rate because they are notworried about quality any more. That would be the essence of my message on that.

RG: Thank you. Iwan, do you have thoughts on this?

ID: Yes, really, similarly to what Robert has just said, justifying your price tag comes fromengaging with customers on a level that they understand from their own professions. Soif they have a requirement for compliance, for standards, for accreditation, for CPD, thentranslators have to reflect those back in their own CPD and their own qualifications thatthey get. We also need to show the cost of inappropriate use of technology and show

the opportunities from engaging with the premium sector.


Panel discussion 34

RG: Keith, any thoughts?

KM: There were two things really. One is that ifpeople don’t understand what translating isabout, you might give them an analogy. I wasthinking about the fact that my brother was aconveyancing solicitor, and, if you go backtwenty or thirty years, conveyancing was a jobwhere you provided an all-round customerservice, and you charged probably a couple ofthousand pounds for it. Nowadays you can get acheap and dirty job for around two hundredpounds, but you’re not going to get muchexpertise thrown in, and sometimes maybe,giving potential clients those sort ofcomparisons, about things they understand andhave done before in their own lives, will helpthem to understand, and I think that’s important. Ithink the second point I was going to make would be to, maybe collectively, we’ve mentioned thename Chris Durban a couple of times today, I know Chris produced an excellent piece of literaturetelling potential customers what translation is all about and maybe if each of us has a copy of that andsends it to potential clients just explaining, rather than trying to do that job ourselves: an expert hasdone it already, let’s take advantage of what is there already.

RG: What is Chris’s book called?

DJ: It’s called “Translation: Getting it Right”. And it’s really addressed to the buyer side.

ID: It’s distributed by the translation associations, so the ITI, when we go to events, wehave a high stack, other associations, I’m sure, do the same.

RG: Jane, very quickly.

JM: What we are seeing also is how the world of work has changed for clients, that’srelevant for us too, so lawyers have got faster and more efficient through the use oftechnology, yes, but also because of their experience, and they expect the same thingfrom us, for example, as do banks. I think David touched on that. They expect reliablequality, but they expect personal contact, and they expect you to be able to negotiate

with them, at eye level, to create individual client relationships. That’s important.

RG: All brilliant answers, I think you’ll agree. Question number five: “How can professional bodiespromote standards and maintain the status of the profession bearing in mind that some employers,including government departments, do not always employ qualified translators?” How about first ofall Gurli, would you like to start on that one?

GH: I would love to, and I will challenge the question, which has been my speciality itseems today. First of all, what is a qualified translator? What do we mean by it? We havesome translators who are not educated as translators, who come from other walks of life,sometimes by the sheer point at time in which a country entered the European Union, at


Panel discussion 35

a point in time when there was no translation education in specific countries. It is the case forexample in Portugal, when Portugal acceded to the EU there wasn’t much translation education andwe recruited quite a number of people from other walks of life – lawyers, engineers, people in theworld of chemistry, doctors, all kinds of people, with very good language knowledge and with a flairfor translation and then they got the rest of it with them on the way through the process, throughlearning on the job, combined with some competences.

So the question is what we do we mean when we do not employ qualified translators, andthat’s exactly why we are testing competences are not looking at a diploma. This being said, I wouldvery much recommend that people who come from other walks of life and who have such valuable in-depth thematic knowledge, which we need very badly, that they add to their education apostgraduate Master’s in translation, be it the EMT form or another Master’s in translation; it was donesystematically in Malta for instance, to bring up the number of people mastering Maltese and beingable to come in as translators in the European Union. It has functioned very well.

RG: Thank you very much. Robert, do you employ, or do you distinguish between professionalqualified translators and other translators when you employ them?

RC: We would tend to go for so-called professional translators but I have a very openmind from personal experience. Just by way of anecdote, there is in insurance andreinsurance, the bible of reinsurance. It’s a huge tome, written by a gentleman called R.L.Carter, and when my father worked in Madrid running a reinsurance company he wasasked by a Spanish reinsurance company to translate it. He said “I couldn’t possibly do

that because I don’t have time; why don’t you give it to a professional translator? And then I’ll reviewthe translation”. The professional translator was fully accredited, very good, and he wrote uttergibberish. And Dad had to rewrite the entire book – so he should have done it in the first place. So Igo back to what Gurli was saying: what do you mean by a professional translator? So when we picktranslators, we have to be certain that they are competent in the thematic – the subject matter firstand foremost.

RG: And this is something that David, once again – and all of us, you were all nodding when Davidwas talking – was talking about: style, quality of writing, insight, basically being good at everything tobe a good translator. Anyone else want to comment on that one? Keith?

KM: It was really a comment about money, because the question mentions governmentdepartments and even government departments not always employing qualifiedtranslators. Those of us who have been in the battle involved around court interpretingknow that there is very much a, let’s say, a “there isn’t enough money left” attitude ingovernment and they are really looking at ways to cut the bills and that I guess applies

across the piece, it’s not just government. A lot of potential employers are actually faced with verytight budgets so there is an enormous difference there between the sort of world you’ve describedthere, David – in a way you’re in-house and your own company values what you do, and thensomebody like a big government department that is just desperate to provide a service at the lowestcost possible and that’s the danger of then being undercut by people who are not properly qualifiedtranslators being willing to do work for less. You know, professional associations have a big role toplay there. And there’s a whole discussion to be had obviously about seeking protection, statutoryprotection of title for translators. There really isn’t anything like that in the UK. In Germany, you haveyour sworn translators, we’ve got the DPSI for interpreters. There isn’t really an equivalent, not theDipTrans, not an MA or MSc in translation. So that’s really something to go for.


Panel discussion 36

RG: Definitely something to push for. We have a sixth question from Abbie Matthews:“Do employers value quality over speed when hiring recent graduates who may have theskills but cannot yet compete with their experienced counterparts for time?” Dorothy, it’sa difficult one that isn’t it because it’s a grey area.

DK: It is. I think it’s related to going back to saying when you have just got your degreeyou cannot necessarily be expected to work to the same standard, at the same speed, assomeone who has been working for some time, and it comes back also to what I wassaying about the responsibility for training has to go also beyond academic institutionsand employers – and this is obviously not exactly the same in the freelance market – but

employers do have, I believe, here a responsibility for ensuring that there is a pathway intoemployment for people who have just graduated and ensuring that there is some form of mentoring,in-house mentoring, whatever, and it is part of the sharing of responsibility for training.

RG: Thank you very much. Jane, do you want to comment on that?

JM: I think we’re all in agreement that it’s easier to make someone who is good andthorough faster than it is to make someone who is just fast, good and thorough. It’s thesame in many professions – it’s not just translation or interpreting, it’s the same withbookkeepers. One of the things that we say when people come to our law firm as newtranslators is “take your time”; yes, we’re happy if it arrives quickly, but in principle we

would rather have the right translation, because I think we’ve all experienced a situation wheresomebody said “just send it to us”, or “send us the first half”, or whatever. But that’s no help, becauseonce the translation is out there in the world, suddenly no one can remember the circumstances underwhich it was completed, or the speed, or the pressure of time that was brought to bear on that work,and when it’s there it stands alone for the quality that you produce and nobody can remember how orwhy it was like that.

So I think the important thing is to persuade employers to take the time, as you just said, but,that said, there is also the expectation that after a certain period, somebody will get up to speed, andthat has to do with working attitudes as well. When I first arrived at my law firm, I did everythingmyself until I realised by dictating, as the lawyers do, and having a fantastic secretary who was sixhundred kilometres away, but she was brilliant, I could increase the speed and the amount of what Iproduced at the very best quality by about half as much again. I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’thad that experience and seen the lawyers doing it: “perhaps I should try it”.

DJ: I just want to circle back to what Dorothy said about internships because I feel likeI’m sitting next to the academic world here, watching them pleading with industry to dosomething about it. So I’m going to grab my “industry” hat and say, if you’re not doingthat, you’re being kind of dumb. I mean, obviously I have a privileged conduit for interns– basically, I shamelessly take my best students every semester if they want to do their

thesis and say “come and work in the bank”. And that becomes succession planning for us. But it’s areally great deal for the bank. Because these people are sharp. They’re also straight off the boat. Imean, we are stranded in a source language zone, there is a real danger of your target languagegetting a bit weird around the edges, but these kids are coming straight over from Colorado, or NewHaven, Connecticut, or wherever. , And what’s good too is it gives energy back to the team.

So there’s no good reason not to have internships running. Our ratio of interns to employees ispretty high. I have got a very small shop – and I almost always have at least one intern in English andvery often one in German as well.


Panel discussion 37

RG: Thank you very much. And we now have our seventh question from Amanda Clement.

Amanda: So the question is, would the panel consider that post-graduate translation students havesufficient – or should they have more – teaching of some of the professional skills – we’ve talked alittle bit about some of them this afternoon, specialisation and so on – should they have moreprofessional skills taught alongside their more practical translation skills at postgraduate translationlevel?

RG: Shall we go to Keith and Iwan on this one? Iwan, were you first on this one, and then Keith?

ID: Yes, there are lots of good postgraduatecourses here in the UK and they offer modules inprofessionalism and a lot of those modules aremandatory in many cases. The EMT has helpedthere as well. You’ve got institutions likeWestminster University that have been doingthis for a long time and you’ve got otherinstitutions which have followed in their wake.But there are other add-ons as well. The ITIorganises an event called SWATI – which is“Starting Work as a Translator or Interpreter” –which is a free event for students to go along.It’s a day event, and members of ITI go alongand talk about what they do as a professionaltranslator or interpreter. We have people whocome along from translation companies to talk

about the expectations of LSPs or translation users to the students, and then there’s a question andanswer session at the end, and that’s the sort of event that really gets the students immersed in theindustry rather than simply learning how to translate. And we’re doing that now with Portsmouth andAston and with Heriot Watt in addition to Westminster. There is also the national network fortranslation, for example, which is organising again these kinds of events up and down the country.Having said that, there is no substitute for experience. We have already mentioned mentoring, andinternships, and it is very important to get graduates into translation companies so that they can seethe processes from that side of the fence. And maybe just to finish, graduates today are probablybetter equipped than they ever have been in terms of the techniques and the facts that they have attheir disposal when coming into their translation career. But we still need to give them moreexperience whilst they are on the course.

RG: Thank you very much. Keith, do you want to add to that?

KM: Yes, I was thinking about the specific reference to postgraduate translatingqualifications, which is what I’m picking up on. Quite a few people may actually comeand do a postgraduate qualification later in life when they’ve done something else. Infact it’s quite a good route into translation, if you’ve been using languages in other ways.I would probably find it quite frustrating, if I went on a course like that, at age thirty-five

or forty, and were being taught basic business practice. So I think there’s probably…you ought toknow where to go to learn things that are specific to translation, good translation practice, but also,the other business skills that you need. If you’re going to be a freelance translator, you’re going to bea micro-business, and I think those skills are probably best taught somewhere else. There are other


Panel discussion 38

places to pick them up. But organisations like the ITI and my own, the CIOL, do run those courses too.But also, there are other opportunities. When I launched into work as a self-employed translator, I gottraining from my bank, on things like taxation, which are really important. I don’t think that language-related bodies should be teaching those sorts of skills. I think there’s a mixture of different skills thatneed to be taught. Some can be taught by specialist organisations, or academics, others you shouldbe looking elsewhere.

RG: What’s interesting is, it would be very useful, wouldn’t it, to have central registers ofwho’s providing these additional translator services, or business translation services, Imean, that does seem to be a lack.

KM: I think, again, both Iwan and I would say, you know, join a professional membershipbody, particularly for freelancers. If you’re out there on your own, that body can provide you with a lotof support – I’m a member of both actually – so those organisations can help you a great deal.

RG: OK, we all seem to agree on that. On Question Time they always go back to the questioner andsay “Are you satisfied with that answer?” How do you feel about that, Amanda? Does that help a bit?

Amanda: Yes, thanks, it does. I hadn’t actually considered…a lot of, all of the students that I havetaught over the last two years are, have come straight from university to their Master’s, so I hadn’tactually considered Keith’s point about people actually returning to further education to consolidateskills, so that’s a very good point.

RG: Well thank you very much indeed. And so we’ve got our eighth question from Katrina Austin.

Katrina: Most new translators work through intermediaries, like us, rather than directly with clients.How can translation companies and agencies help develop freelance translators, and is that their jobin the first place?

RG: Dorothy, do you fancy a hack at this?

DK: Yes, I think it comes back to what we were saying earlier. I think that there has to beshared responsibility in training, and responsibility cannot only be in the academicinstitutions, which can take the students so far, and I believe that there is a role, I havejust said a little while ago, for employers, but in the same way I think there is a role foragencies also to go through an induction period with new translators and help them into

their role, help them to familiarise themselves with procedures, processes and also, of course, clientexpectations and so on. I would plead very, very strongly for shared responsibility.

RG: Anyone else got strong views about helping freelance translators?

ID: Yes, I know CLS, for example, has done training in financial translation, for freelancersas well, organised in London. Internships, mentoring, are all things that translationcompanies are able to do. But also there has to be a confidence in translation companiesto introduce their translators to the end client, to take them on factory visits, to takethem on site visits, to allow the two sides of the equation to mix, to have the confidence

that the freelancer isn't going to run off with a customer at a lower price and cut out the middlemanand to encourage some interchange there so that the translator can actually understand what theclient’s needs are.


Panel discussion 39

KM: I think there’s a very, very big difference between translating companies and translating agencies,and the question talked about both. A lot of agencies just see themselves as handing the work on:“you get on with it”. And I think translating companies are very different: a good translating companymanages the whole project, treats a lot of their freelancers almost like remotely working employees.

RG: I think that’s quite common in this area, isn’tit. The “cottage industry” of translation. Gurli?

GH: Yes, unfortunately, probably it is true, Iwould say no matter what the contractualrelationship between recruit and employerwhether it’s a lot of short-term contracts – so,specific jobs to be done – or whether it is longerterm contracts, there will always be a learningcurve for a new recruit. If we want a new recruitto have a very good match with a company, andI do guess that goes also for translationagencies – they also want to have a very goodmatch between their needs and the people theyemploy through short-term contracts on themarket. There will have to be an investment; I’msure it pays off in the longer run and we all have an interest in training our recruits, no matter the typeof contract.

RG: Thank you very much, now, I hope you’re not counting, but we’re going to jump to question tenfrom Sheilah Cardno: Is it time to get rid of our multilingual, bilingual and monolingual dictionariesand glossaries? Why do they still line the shelves of busy translators who can now find the right wordfaster by clicking rather than flicking? Iwan, and then all along the table.

ID: That’s a challenge – thank you! Clicking delivers data at the speed of light down fibre-optic channels, flicking allows you to think about the translation. Why would you notwant to think about the translation?

RC: I endorse that, and flicking is much more fun. [Laughter]

JM: The answer is never, ever, I would never, ever get rid of what’s on the shelf in favourof what’s in the computer, because they supplement each other. How often have we allfound something in a dictionary that was perhaps in an electronic form, and wonderedwhether that’s really the right thing? And that’s the reason why we are not paid to putdown the first word that comes into our head or appears on our screen: we are paid to

make sure it’s the very best translation that it can be.

GH: I think I’ll come with a rather unusual answer to this one. I recommend you all putyour bookshelves away from your desk. By using the flicking mechanism in yourdictionaries you will be able to move, and I think one of our traumas as translators is ofan ergonomic kind. You are using your mouse fingers to click; you are using yourdictionaries to get up and move and reflect.

DJ: Should you get rid of your dictionaries? No! No, I mean, you are, in my vision, anyway, a major


Panel discussion 40

league language geek, right? Loving books, loving dictionaries is a major part of that, right? You listento songs for the lyrics, so you love Elvis Costello, your sense of prose is informed by T.S. Eliot, etc.Andpart of this is loving books! So, no! But be clear-headed about it. For your job – because, remember,translation is a job, about which we should be business-like, and dispassionate – if it’s more efficient toclick through, then do your job that way.

DK: I would say very definitely "no", and can I just comment that it is actually one of thethings we have difficulty doing in some academic programmes: persuading students thatthere are also paper sources out there.

RG: And Keith, no pressure!

KM: That’s all right! Actually it’s a slightly flippant reply: I feel about my dictionaries like Ifeel about my beautiful leather-bound Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I bought in, Ithink, 1985, when my mother died and I inherited some money: I never ever, ever look atit, it’s so much easier to search and get answers that way, but I would never ever, throw itaway, and I certainly feel that way about the dictionaries.

RG: I think we all have that in common, we all love our old dictionaries, they all have a life and yourefer to so many different books to get so many different answers. Well, thank you, and what anincredibly interesting panel that was. I hope you enjoyed it.


Speaker and panellist biographies 41

Gurli Hauschildt

Gurli has been a Director at the EuropeanCommission’s Directorate-General for Translationsince 2008, currently with responsibility for theEnglish, French and German LanguageDepartments and the Terminology CoordinationUnit. Prior to joining the European Commission,she worked as a Danish translator and reviser atthe European Economic and Social Committee,Head of the Joint Planning Service of theEuropean Economic and Social Committee andthe Committee of the Regions, and Head of theCoordination Unit in the Joint Translation Serviceof the European Economic and Social Committeeand the Committee of the Regions. She has aMaster’s in Translation and Interpreting (Cand.ling. merc.) from Aarhus School of Business,Denmark.

David Jemielity

David is Senior English Translator and Head ofTranslations at Banque Cantonale Vaudoise (BCV),in Lausanne, Switzerland. BCV is a mid-sized bankwith CHF 40bn in assets, 2000 employees and 8-10 translators covering English, French, andGerman. Since taking over BCV’s translation teamin 2004, Dave has fundamentally changed theway translating is done at the bank, rebuildingtranslation processes around fluid, often face-to-face communication between his translators andtheir clients and emphasising target-textreadability and effectiveness. This has involved,among other things, changing the sort of peopleBCV hires as translators. Recent developments atthe bank would tend to indicate that Dave’sapproach works: in a 2012 bank-widereorganisation designed to lower communicationsand marketing costs, BCV’s translation team notonly escaped unscathed, it actually moved up inthe organisation chart and is now one report fromthe CEO. Dave is also a tenured faculty memberof the University of Geneva’s Faculty ofTranslation and Interpretation, where he teachesin the graduate programme for aspiringFrench>English translators. His main areas of

research interest are target-text effectiveness inFrench>English financial translation and high-endtranslation process design and management. Hehas spoken on these issues at various conferencesin Europe and North America, most notably asDistinguished Speaker at the 2010 AnnualConference of the American TranslatorsAssociation. He is currently working on thesubject of deixis in French>English translation,which he sees as the key to certain hard-to-put-your-finger-on style problems. Dave studiedEnglish and philosophy at Amherst College (BA)and 18th century English literature at OxfordUniversity (MPhil). He then taught Englishliterature for several years at the universities ofLausanne and Neuchâtel before moving intotranslation in the late 1990s.

Dorothy Kelly

Dorothy is a professor of Translation at theUniversity of Granada (Spain), where she is alsoVice Rector for International Relations andDevelopment Cooperation. She obtained her BAin Translating and Interpreting at Heriot-WattUniversity, Edinburgh (Scotland), and her doctoraldegree from the University of Granada. Her mainresearch interests are translator training,directionality in translation and interculturalcompetence, interests she has combined over theyears with intense international activity,coordinating international mobility and jointdegree programmes, as well as studies into theimpact of mobility on intercultural competenceand the learning environment. She is foundingeditor of the Interpreter and Translator Trainer,the only indexed journal devoted specifically totranslator education, and consultant editor of theTranslation Practices Explained series. She was amember of the European Master’s in TranslationExpert Group appointed by the DirectorateGeneral for Translation at the EuropeanCommission. As Vice Rector she was a member ofSpain’s national Bologna Experts Team until 2013,and is currently the Chair of the Executive Boardof the Coimbra Group of Universities.


Speaker and panellist biographies 42

Keith Moffitt

Keith Moffitt MCIL has been CIOL Chair ofCouncil since 2012 and works as a freelancetranslator and language consultant. He had a 20-year career with the National Coal Board (laterBritish Coal), working in International Relationsand European Community affairs, and finally asenior post in Corporate Affairs. He was for sixyears Chairman of the United Nations WorkingParty on Coal Trade. Keith is a governor of theCity Literary Institute, which has a major focus onlanguage teaching. Outside the world oflanguages and international relations, Keith hasjust completed 20 years as a councillor on theLondon Borough of Camden, which he led forfour years.

Iwan Davies

Iwan has been a freelance translator for 15 yearsand currently serves as Chairman of the Instituteof Translation & Interpreting, the UK’s onlydedicated association for practising translationand interpreting professionals. As Chairman, Iwanleads the Board of the Institute, which isresponsible for ensuring oversight of ITI’soperating activities and for setting its strategy.Iwan works through his own company,Translutions Limited, to provide customers aroundEurope with translation services in the fields of IT,finance and renewables. He became an Associateof ITI in 1999 and gained his QualifiedMembership in 2001. Before going freelance,Iwan was a staff translator and translation teamleader at a midsize software company in Germanyand a multilingual support agent for IBM inScotland. He lives in Perth, Scotland, with his wifeand two daughters, and recently started learningScottish Gaelic for the second time.

Jane Martens

Jane was born in Zimbabwe in 1967. She readLaw at the University of Cambridge and wasawarded her Diploma in Translation in 1999. She

went on to obtain Chartered Linguist status andbecome a state-certified translator for the Berlincourts and notaries. Jane works for a majorGerman law firm and continues to serve herfreelance translation clients, including banks, lawfirms, international companies and universities.She lives with her husband and five children inBerlin.

Robert Capurro

Born and brought up in Bogotá, Robert wassubsequently educated in the UK at The King’sSchool Canterbury and King’s College London.Graduating in 1983, Robert embarked upon acareer in international corporate insurancebroking which included stints with Barclays, A&A,Sedgwick, Aon, Willis and JLT in The City ofLondon as well as senior management positionsbased in Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam andSantiago de Chile. Throughout this period,Robert specialised in insurance for majormultinational companies as well as large singlerisks across many sectors includingmanufacturing, hotels, marine, energy,construction, pulp and paper, forestry, mining,water utilities and business to business services.In addition to 26 years in insurance, Robert wasalso Director of Sales for Latin America andCaribbean for four years for Mabey Bridge,developing high technology modular steel rural,emergency and highway bridge projectsthroughout the region. Robert joined CanningHouse in 2013 combining his knowledge of andpassion for Latin America and Iberia with a strongcommercial business background for the purposeof driving the organisation into a new era ofincreased activity, relevance and growth in linewith the rising importance and profile of LatinAmerica.

Chartered Institute of LinguistsDunstan House (4th floor)14a St Cross StreetLondon EC1N 8XAUnited Kingdomwww.ciol.org.uk@ciolinguists

DG Translation Field OfficeEuropean Commission Representation in the UKEurope House32 Smith SquareLondon SW1P 3EUhttp://ec.europa.eu/unitedkingdom@europeinuk@translatores

Institute of Translation and InterpretingMilton Keynes Business CentreFoxhunter DriveLinford WoodMilton KeynesMK14 6GDUnited Kingdomwww.iti.org.uk@itiuk


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