ELIA Networking Days Tuscany – in review

Another ELIA ND event is over – unfortunately – because it seems that all attendees would rather stay in the Tuscany area and relax with amazing food and wine under a gorgeous weather. But – returning to reality – we all have to get back to our regular lives and, of course, continue to run our localization business. Speaking of, let’s round up what we took back with us from this extraordinary event:

1. As mentioned before, dozens of (red) wine bottles that we are sure will help us relax after (or during?) our hard-days work.

2. Lots of interesting thoughts about our industry future:

• During the “Wired/Tired/Expired” session by Michael Oettli, attendees were divided in teams and had to discuss and report back the trends/tools/processes in our industry that are obsolete (Expired), just barely making it (Tired) and are in for the future (Wired). We were surprised by the common ground reported back: Our industry is changing fast and LSPs need to adapt to new models, processes, technologies, but – most of all – attitudes towards client relationships.
• In the “LSP-Client Collaboration as a Growth Startegy for LSP’s” session, David Kanek and Robert Etches talked about the importance of involving the client in the translation process and suggested that we should all embrace changes in our industry. They also mentioned how we can use crowd-sourcing to cut down costs and  pointed out that even banks have fans! Their main point: We sell solutions, not words!
• During the “Perfect Tools” session, led by Christian Schwendy and Patrick Bajon, in addition to all the nice technology tweaks that all the teams reported they would like to see (including a client bank money extractor tool), we were introduced to the Six Hats theory that can prove very useful in our every day business. We will certainly put it into action in our company!
• In the “Why is MT about speed” session, Eef Blommaart  pointed out that we can provide “Fast”, “Good” & “Cheap” services, all at the same time by using machine translation.

3. Some practical tips from sessions to apply to our daily businesses:

• Robert Ganzerli presented tips and tricks for preparing a budget in our (uncertain) industry. Main points: Use historical data and involve everyone in the thought process.
• Maria Kania-Tasjak advised us on which RFPs are made for loving and which we should avoid. Hint: Look carefully at the RFP questions – there lies the client’s problem!
• Anne-Marie Colliander-Lind stressed out the importance of having a written social media strategy and showed us how far 100 euros can take you in social media marketing.
• Henk Boxma presented an interesting case study regarding screenshot localization and described the solution he developed to generate one screenshot for all target languages simultaneously.

Last – but not least – the infamous Bull’s Eye session was definitely one of the best in this series. Manal Amin and Tea Diettrich created the ‘el clasico’; two totally contrasting in style presentations that attracted similar comments from panel and audience alike.

Commit has enjoyed the event thoroughly from start to end (including the wine which wasn’t actually ending) and is looking forward to be part of the next ND to be held in Lyon, April 16-17, 2015. See you all there!