A Tradition Continues

In early November, the kothes Translation team got together with our freelance translators for our annual meeting. Once again we met at Wild Wedding Loft in Berlin, which offers a cosy atmosphere and plenty of space to exchange ideas. Under the slogan "Best of 2017 and 2018", we added both interactive and informative items to this year's programme.

For the first part, we deliberately chose a direct approach: instead of initiating a short personal online survey, we wanted immediate feedback. We view our freelance colleagues as an integral part of our company and would like to use their feedback to further optimise our work processes. The kothes Translation team prepared questions on a variety of everyday translation topics. In rotating small groups, the participants then exchanged views on the respective subject and documented their feedback on index cards. We're excited about the evaluation and look forward to strengthening the cooperation with our translators.

For the second part, we invited speakers from the IT, Quality Management and Technical Editorial departments to help make the holistic approach of our work at kothes more tangible for the translators. Marie Blanke kicked things off with an introduction on how to use regular expressions when working with memoQ. When correctly applied, they truly help. The Regex Tagger helps in preventing errors in translations and thus guarantees quality and consistency, as well as more accurate word analyses. In the second presentation, Carsten Sieber talked about quality management and illustrated the demands kothes places on all project participants in order to ensure the best possible quality. Last but not least, Nina Schaub reported on how much added value kothes' close cooperation – especially between the Technical Editorial and Translation departments – creates for our customers and for the kothes project team.

The last part of the evening, which is always an integral part of the agenda, took place with at least as many conversations as during the initial round of feedback. All came together over food and drink, made new contacts and renewed old acquaintances.

We'd like to thank all participants, and we look forward to the next "Translators' Meeting" in 2020.