During term two, my fellow students taking the MA Translation and Cultures course and I were invited to visit Comtec — a language service provider based in Leamington Spa. These optional work-place visits were organised to support our learning of translation technologies CAT used within the industry and to give us the opportunity to see inside a successful organisation within the language services sector.
I was interested to see the wide range of roles that existed within the company, many of which I had no knowledge of before starting the MA course and this visit. For example, within Comtec there is a Business Development Team to build new contacts and sales opportunities, a Marketing team to manage campaigns and social media and a Technology Development Team developing software solutions with a focus on Machine Translation and generative AI.
Olivia and Phoebe were genuinely happy to answer our many questions and explain what their day to day working life looked like. A little later, we were introduced online to one of their freelance translators and proofreaders, Ingrid.
This was such an interesting chat and a great opportunity to ask questions about what is really like working as a freelance translator today. Ingrid talked to us about how her registration with the Institute of Translation and Interpreting ITI had been really instrumental in building her client base and how she liked to work both with agencies such as Comtec and with direct clients also. In class we have learnt about a range of CAT tools available for translators to use and so discussing the pros and cons of some of these with Ingrid was also insightful and useful when thinking about our future choices.
It was great to put our academic learning into real life contexts. After speaking with Ingrid and asking her lots of questions we were introduced to the Account Managers and learnt about some of the projects they were working on. The main task of account managers is to build and maintain relationships with existing clients and ensure the successful delivery of their projects. I was really pleased to be shown a transcreation project that the company was undertaking as this is a potential future career area, I am keen on pursuing.
