Our Nordic Translation Industry Forum Blog diary!

by Garth Hedenskog From Wednesday, the 22nd until Friday the 24th of November, Pangeanic traveled north to Helsinki to attend our first Nordic Translation Industry Forum! And what an amazing event it was.

Let’s start off by saying that Helsinki is a stunning location for business or pleasure. The team was greeted by light snow and a high of 1ºC for most of the 4 day stay! Garth Hedenskog (our sales director) and Alex Helle (our chief research and developer) were lucky enough to go this year. This was naturally a very popular event/destination to attend with a lot of staff at Pangeanic very eager to go! Here is Garth and Alex trying to look busy with at the interpreting challenge, they didn’t fool anyone!

Garth and Alex of course didn’t just go for the beautiful scenery, adventure and crisp fresh Nordic air, they went to showcase Pangeanic’s technology, see what the Nordic translation industry had to offer and of course let their hair down and mingle with our amazing localization colleagues. And this is how the 3 days unfolded in their own words….. The reception was apparently wonderful but our flight unfortunately got in a little late so missed the whole thing! Chatting with our colleagues the next morning, we were sorry to have missed it! Day 1: We got in nice and early to setup our stand. The people at NTIF we great and made the whole experience truly unforgettable. Everything functioned like clockwork and all support and assistance made the whole setup a really simple and fun experience.

Throughout day 1 we were treated to some really inspiration and unforgettable speeches and here were some of them… Klaus Fleischman from Kaleidoscope spoke about the power of words or how we never get a second chance to make a first impression Gábor Bessenyei, MorphoLogic Localisation addressed how custom neural MT engines are at your fingertips Lara Millmow, from Elia gave an interesting presentation about taking a broad view on your business Ádám Marjai, memoQ spoke about their Translation project management solution We were treated to many other very interesting presentations. That night we were treated to an exquisite dinner followed by some questionable dancing! We had Reindeer for dinner, first time for many. As they say, when in Rome… The location was absolutely beautiful, right near the water of the Baltic sea. We had a scrumptious 3 course meal, drinks, dancing and fascinating conversations. What more could we ask for.

The night absolutely flew by which no doubt proved how successful and fun it was. Day 2: Day 2 started with our gracious hosts laying out a spread of healthy juices, snacks (there may or may not have been miniature bottles of vodka available) and most importantly some headache tablets for the weary party animals. Alex and I were of course fresh as daisies (kind of)…. Day 2 was also sadly our last day so we really tried to speak to all the visitors and exhibitors we hadn’t had time to meet with during the previous day. Our neighbors (Memsource) had one of those virtual reality games which was a great energy boost when we needed it! Thanks Memsource! Again the talent presenting was incredible so we snuck away as often as we could to learn as much as possible about trends and best practices. [caption id="attachment_2314" align="aligncenter" width="300"]

With Jaba Translations CEO Joaquim Alves[/caption] Again, some of the standout presentations for us were: Salvo Giammarresi from PayPal explaining what Globalization is and how LSP (traditionally Language Service Provider) should strive to be more Language Service Partners. We were amazed by the talent and expertise on show at the Interpreting Software Challenge. It was really inspiration stuff and the company’s founders came from some really disadvantages backgrounds. I’d like to mention them all and encourage you to check their companies out. Tulka Interprefy Interactio Tikktalk Youpret Kudo We had a delicious lunch kindly sponsored by AAC Global where we had an opportunity to see some amazing friends.

Our booth was very busy with students and LSPs learning about the latest developments in the Neural Machine Translation field, in particular about Pangeanic’s PangeaMT solution. We demonstrated how it is completely compatible with our centralized translation memory system - ActivaTM.  Cor (our web based translation management system with built in crawler) was also very popular and we couldn’t have been happier telling everyone who would listen all about it. We could’ve easily stayed another few days but we sadly had to pack up that afternoon at about 5pm but not before we were involved with the prize giving and farewells where we gave an amazing Fitbit Alta HR away. The lucky winner was …..drum roll please….. Karel Mostek from Moravia! Thank you Helsinki and NTIF, it was amazing! We look forward to being back next year!