Bridging the Gap Between the Language Industry and Academia

Expectations of the Language Industry

The language industry has the highest expectations for newly hired linguists in the area of attitudes, skills and knowledge. While we receive dozens of resumes from translators every day, linguists who have recently graduated from translation programs often lack skills to work on our projects.

In addition to excellent knowledge of the foreign language, linguists must show the proper attitude, must be committed, dedicated, self-disciplined, self-motivated, show an aptitude and willingness to learn, have strong analytic, listening and communication skills, attention to detail, flexibility/adaptability, good cultural awareness, love of reading, strong IT and research skills. Powerful writing skills are a must. In addition they must be able to work in a team and collaborate: people think translation is a solitary activity but in fact translators often work in virtual teams, revising each others’ work or sharing big projects.

Our areas of concern are multiple:

Institutions:

Often there is too much disparity among institutions in the selection criteria of candidates. Sometimes the curriculum is the same but the outcome is different. Also the knowledge and skills taught in colleges may be neither adequate nor fully relevant.

Lack of understanding for industry specific content is another concern. There is a need for constant learning and updating knowledge for changing environment and market realities. Academic programs are sometimes not conversant with practical knowledge as they are overly focused on theoretical knowledge.

Students:

Often new graduates have unrealistic expectations (salary, position, mobility) and show a perception disorder (degree alone is sufficient to get me job, high salary). They can get easily frustrated. If they do not immediately achieve the highest income, if they are not doing the high-level work they expected, they start looking elsewhere. This leads a number of newly hired linguists to jump from one organization to another in hopes of getting the job that meets their expectations, even if that job is not available to recent graduates.

Let’s make an early impact!

In an effort to make an early impact, we are now bridging the gap between Industry and academics with special reference to current experiences of industry and expertise of students.

The objective is to bring Industry and academia closer in terms of having productive discussion about the opportunities where they can work for mutual benefits, to explore the possibility of having customized curriculum as per the need of industry, to discuss about the current needs of industry in terms of competent manpower and how academia can help them to bring the desired skill set.

It is crucial to express the expectation of industries to institutions and to let students know it will often take 2 to 5 years to gain the necessary skills and experience to become a competent linguist.

We have therefore started to visit foreign colleges and communicate the industry needs with the heads of translation and interpreting departments. This month we visited the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece and spoke with Anastasia Parianou, Panayiotis Kelandrias, and Georgios Michalakopoulos.

Together we discussed our respective concerns and possibilities of collaboration to better empower students to meet the language industry challenges and requirements. We have chosen several initiatives to increase their skills and improve their hiring opportunities and started a continuous communication and hiring procedure for the graduate students. This will hopefully lead to a long-term relationship with foreign universities for the benefit of all involved.

For an overview of our translation expertise, visit our legal translation page.

Tags: language industry, linguists

Category: Translation Services