České překlady attended Meet Central Europe 2019
The second annual Meet Central Europe conference took place on 10 and 11 October.
This time, the venue was in Prague, which is also home to České překlady. The conference was organized by four European associations of translation companies, namely ACTA (Czech Republic), AATC (Austria), ATCSK (Slovakia) and Proford (Hungary). The event has gained considerably in popularity since last year, with the number of attendees from 39 countries almost doubling compared to last year’s meeting in Budapest.
We also used this great opportunity to meet our peers from the translation industry and decided not just to participate in the event as attendees, but to become exhibitors. Our team presented the company from a pink booth offering homemade gingerbread sweets. With all modesty, we can say the České překlady booth was one of the most visited during the conference, not only because of these sweets that were offered, but also thanks to the ongoing contest in English tongue-twisters and, of course, the information about all the services our company offers.
What makes Meet Central Europe unique compared to other conferences of a similar type?
One of the most important aspects is that this event is organized as a platform for the meeting of all language professionals, i.e. not only representatives of providers of language services, their vendor managers, account managers, project managers, and members of management or marketing specialists, but also freelancers, vendors of translation software and project management systems, and even representatives of translation service buyers and academia.
As last year, the main conference topic was vendor management, i.e. taking care of translation service professionals, their recruitment, training, quality, management systems, etc. In addition, many papers covered business and marketing topics, from global business growth strategies to issues associated with brand building, or the specific aspects of the markets in individual Central European countries.
There were also presentations dealing with translations for the European Union and the European Commission, as well as specific services currently making their way into the portfolios of translation service providers, such as transcreation (creative translations) or MT post-editing. The agenda offered workshops organized by providers of CAT tools (computer-assisted translation software or translation management systems), such as Memsource, Trados and MemoQ.
One of the events that attracted the greatest attention was a panel discussion including the representatives of two large translation service buyers and some of the language service providers, which provided insights into what is crucial in the selection of translation service suppliers. The house was again full towards the end of the conference, during the second panel discussion, covering the hot issues of vendor management. Our vendor manager Gabriela had the opportunity to share some of her extensive experience in this area.
For the first time, the conference offered a half-day Jobs Fair, providing space for meetings between translation service providers and language professionals to discuss new job opportunities. Another innovation was a block of lectures given by the world’s largest professional association for technical documentation, tekom Europe e.V., focusing on the issues of the creation and translations of technical documentation.
The conference offered a gala dinner and informal evening meetings of peers from the industry in Prague’s restaurants and pubs, which we also helped organize. One can hardly think of a better venue for a gala dinner than the Dancing House at Rašínovo nábřeží. The views of Prague in the evening from the roof deck were breathtaking!
We would like to thank the enthusiastic organizers of MCE2019 in Prague with all our hearts and we are looking forward to the MCE2020 conference in Innsbruck, the jewel of the Alps.
Author: Irena Šotková
