ELIA Together 2018 – In review!

ELIA Together, the premium event that brings together language service companies and freelance linguists took place last week and we couldn’t have been more excited! You see, it was hosted in our hometown, Athens, and we got to welcome and meet old and new business partners, colleagues and friends.

The venue

The event was hosted at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre (MAICC) that is undoubtedly a stunning, state-of-the-art venue for conferences and events. With three different halls covering the three different tracks of the conference (Specialisation, Trends and Technology), there was a session for each taste!

The food

You can’t go wrong with Greek food! The menu on both days included fresh salads, mouth-watering appetizers, typical dishes for meat lovers, lots of options for vegetarians, and luscious desserts!

The program

The theme for the third edition of Together was Specialise to Excel and had 31 different sessions. Here are some of the sessions that we managed to attend:

• Óscar Jiménez Serrano gave the keynote speech on Technology disruption in translation and interpreting mentioning a lot of successful examples (and some not so successful ones) from his personal career.
• Wolfgang Steinhauer’s session had a very intriguing title as he promised to show us how to drastically increase our productivity in order to manage to translate 10.000 words per day! His method and point of view was very interesting, and this is something that we will definitely investigate further.
• Another informative session was the one presented by Sarah Henter, which was an introduction to clinical trials. She focused on what makes the linguistic work on clinical trials so special, what kind of texts and target audiences there are and what knowledge linguists need to acquire in order to efficiently work in this area.
• Josephine Burmester and Jessica Mann gave a presentation on Marketing localization and the complexities of this field. They gave very vivid examples taken from the German advertising industry and showed us how something global can become local (or not!).
• Daniela Zambrini focused on the purposes of Simplified Technical English, illustrating the structure of the ASD-STE100 Specification and its advantages for translators and technical authors. This session was quite interactive since at the end we had to re-write sentences according to the Specification.
• If you wanted to learn more about patent translation, you had to attend Timothy Hodge’s presentation called “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to translate patents”. Showing interesting facts and examples from our everyday life, he gave us an insight on the life of a patent translator and also gave us some tricks for finding and using the right terminology for translating a patent document.
• This year, Commit presented a session as well! Our CEO Vasso Pouli addressed an important point about specialisation: the huge value we can add by combining vertical, task and technology knowledge. She made an interesting point by showing how we can expand our localization services by adding new skills to our portfolio.

Our booth/our team

Commit had a booth and we got to showcase our new corporate image and marketing material. We got to meet and greet lots of familiar faces as well as new business contacts that we hope will lead to fruitful collaborations. We would like to thank everyone who visited our booth and of course the ELIA organization that made this conference possible. Ευχαριστώ!