Recaps
NTIF 2019 held for the ninth time
The Nordics in November? Who wants to subject themselves to that? Quite a few, it seems, as 183 participants from 25 countries came together in the Swedish city of Gothenburg for the ninth edition of the Nordic Translation Industry Forum (NTIF) November 24-26, 2019. Gothenburg, or Göteborg in Swedish, is sometimes called the largest noncapital of the Nordics and its location by the North Sea makes it a truly international city. The venue carefully chosen for the conference was the recently renovated Elite Park Avenue hotel on the main boulevard Avenyn.
The conference started with two master classes for language service providers: Strategy & Sales and Hands-On NMT. Shortly after, on Sunday evening, all participants were invited to a welcome reception to mingle and get to know each other before the conference began in earnest on Monday. The “Find-a-Swede” networking activity was highly appreciated as all the international guests received a list of Swedish phrases that they could test out on a local:
- [ Hej, jag heter Cecilia (Hello, I’m Cecilia)
- [ Kommer du från Göteborg? (Are you a local from Gothenburg?)
- [ Vilket väder vi har! (The weather is something else!)
The Nordics in November? Who wants to subject themselves to that? Quite a few, it seems, as 183 participants from 25 countries came together in the Swedish city of Gothenburg for the ninth edition of the Nordic Translation Industry Forum (NTIF) November 24-26, 2019. Gothenburg, or Göteborg in Swedish, is sometimes called the largest noncapital of the Nordics and its location by the North Sea makes it a truly international city. The venue carefully chosen for the conference was the recently renovated Elite Park Avenue hotel on the main boulevard Avenyn.
The conference started with two master classes for language service providers: Strategy & Sales and Hands-On NMT. Shortly after, on Sunday evening, all participants were invited to a welcome reception to mingle and get to know each other before the conference began in earnest on Monday. The “Find-a-Swede” networking activity was highly appreciated as all the international guests received a list of Swedish phrases that they could test out on a local:
- [ Hej, jag heter Cecilia (Hello, I’m Cecilia)
- [ Kommer du från Göteborg? (Are you a local from Gothenburg?)
- [ Vilket väder vi har! (The weather is something else!)
The first full day of the conference got underway as in previous years with the inside track feature where sponsors, exhibitors and academia had the chance to share their latest technology developments, service offerings and industry trends. After a delicious networking lunch, the main program kicked off with keynote speaker Nicholas Fernholm, followed by two presentations on best practices from the corporate language departments at The Volvo Group and Ørsted. The storytelling master, Matthew Ogden, closed the first day’s program with an exciting journey among villains and good guys.
A conference banquet was held in the old La Avenue residence with a champagne bar and live music. Many of the participants took the opportunity to dance off some calories until the DJ closed shop sometime after midnight.
On the second day, George Drummond gave a presentation of the Nuremberg trial and the destiny of the interpreters in what came to be known as the birth of modern multilingual simultaneous interpretation. The rest of the day featured two tracks, one focused on interpretation while the other focused on translation and localization. The closing keynote was given by the renowned anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen.
NTIF2019 also introduced the Brain Ring, moderated by Konstantin Dranch, which turned out to be one of the program highlights. Three brave CEOs — Katja Virtanen from Delingua, Henrik Sundberg from GLOBALscandinavia and Lea Backhurst from Summa Linguae Technologies — were invited on stage to answer some challenging questions. The audience got to vote on the best answers and Lea Backhurst won a closely-fought battle with a total of six mandarins (points).
