This year’s summit was held at the stunning Old Royal Navy College, Greenwich on 20th and 21st September and focussed on the theme “Business. Community. Evolution”. Surrey Translation Bureau (STB) was represented at the conference by our Director, George Cooke, Head of Translation Operations, Hannah Stacey, and Sales Manager, Craig Howell, each one coming back with invaluable insights from the presentations and a host of business cards from the new contacts!
One of the most engaging topics from the first day was on mergers and acquisitions, both within the industry and outside. It was refreshing to know that despite the current climate of uncertainty, the UK has been consistently involved in a high number of cross-border deals, still staying on top as an attractive market for the global translation industry. The focus for rest of the day shifted from going global to selling local, stressing the value of having a thorough knowledge of the market in your immediate working vicinity. Day one of the conference closed by addressing another crucial topic that most people in the room could relate to – the challenge posed by late payments and what to do when the situation occurs.
The opening session from the second day was presented by Judy King from BBC Monitoring and proved very popular. Judy gave an interesting insight into how BBC monitoring works with a large team of skilled linguists to make sense of the news stories coming from around the globe. The session revolved around the use of automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine translation (MT) to analyse and filter data to assist linguists. This session was followed by a forum-type discussion on Brexit, with presentations on keeping your staff motivated and a thought-provoking sales case study after lunch. The event closed with the much-anticipated report from ATC Language Industry Survey 2019, as evaluated by market research consultants Nimdzi. The audience in the room were pleased on hearing about a healthy 17% year-on-year growth in combined revenue of language service providers!
The conference certainly met our expectations:
“There were some new and enthusiastic association members at the conference, and I was pleased to see the ATC giving them the opportunity to get involved right from the word go.”– George Cooke, Director, STB
“The conference provided an excellent opportunity to network with similar and like-minded individuals from the industry and uncover potential avenues for collaboration.”– Craig Howell, Sales Manager, STB
Industry conferences such as those organised by the ATC, ITI or Elia serve as a one-stop shop for information on the latest technological trends, industry news and external factors that impact the language market. The events are also excellent platforms for meeting colleagues and existing suppliers, finding new ones and getting our own services out in front of the larger agencies, which otherwise would be hard to reach out to.
Get in touch with us to see how the knowledge we gain at these events manifests in the quality of work we offer you. Call us on 01252 730014 or email hello@surreytranslation.co.uk.
Written by Marya Jabeen
