News in brief

People. 2009 has seen a generation change at Fox Coffey, with a new team taking shape. Following the arrival of legal specialist Nadescha Vester in April, we welcomed project manager Anastasiia Zazirna in July. Translation studies postgraduate Anastasiia is from Ukraine, and apart from her native language speaks perfect Russian, and excellent English, German and Italian; her language skills have already been a big help. Peter Hindt, an experienced German-English technical translator who hails from South Africa, came on board in September.  

In other words. Partners Rob Perry and Jon O'Shea specialise in helping to make clients' communications more customer friendly. Rob attended a Plain English Campaign (PEC) training course earlier this year, and recently completed a PEC course on writing for websites. He is currently applying his skills to a project aimed at improving the website of an international educational organisation.

Satisfaction. As a follow-up to our website relaunch we have introduced a new customer satisfaction form. A link on our standard delivery note takes clients straight to the form on our site, where they can rate our translations and overall service. The form only takes a second to fill out, but should yield invaluable information for our quality assurance system.

Playing host. We met colleagues from translation firms all over Europe when the European Language Industry Association (ELIA) staged a meeting in Vienna from 24-26 September. Partner Jon O'Shea attended a management training course at the event, and enthuses about the insights he gained into increasing efficiency. Our collaboration with fellow ELIA members is growing all the time, so it was very helpful to talk business with our partners from across Central and Southeastern Europe face to face.

Multilingual. In the past Fox Coffey was largely known for German-English translations, but that is changing fast - not least because of ELIA membership. Projects involving several languages have been a feature of this year. Recent contracts have included a multilingual website for a regional tourist board, technical instructions for an energy company and a budget airline's website.

English only. With Vienna-based multinationals increasingly going over to English as their corporate language, there has been a noticeable shift from translation to editing texts written in English by non-native speakers. For example, we now regularly edit market updates issued by a bond trading department at a major international bank.