As a company which deals with language, it is crucial we consider culture as one of the key aspects in our work. It is not enough to just translate a word to another language – our goal is to make sure the material is well understood. So, apart from just the technical side of things, we need to keep cultural background in mind.
This is what we’ve got for clients and freelancers. Yet what about the team itself? Indeed, we have to think about that too.
One of our values is that we have an international team, so we may face cultural differences daily. The phenomenon of culturalisation, therefore, also takes place at TRANSLIT. The term itself stands for adapting a game or application to the certain cultural aspects of the territory where it is planned to be released. We have our own culturalisation which means making cultural differences our strength. How do we use that power?
1. Team meetings – We regularly organise different kinds of team interaction: teambuilding events, brainstorming sessions, managers’ meetings etc. Even though each format serves its own purpose – to build trust, generate ideas, share the updates – it is still about getting connected, getting familiar with the way each one of us speaks and perceives certain info. That is the biggest boost for getting acquainted with each other. We always listen to each team member, give him/her space, encourage proactiveness, thus making sure we establish a deeper level of communication, which usually involves cultural differences. More than that, we try to celebrate (with just a couple of words at least) national holidays that are relevant to certain team members to show respect towards their background.
2. 1-1 with the supervisors – that is not only to track each employee’s progress, that is to encourage people opening up, share something they would want to, but could not do in front of all the other team members.
3. Regular training – not only managers, but even our interns can become speakers on our internal trainings and share.
4. Constructive feedback – we welcome only the approach following the structure: 1) This is what I see not working; 2) This is what I believe is the reason; 3) This is how I suggest you improve it; 4) I know you can. No negative criticism, always a direction to improve given, always belief in people’s potential.
Sounds like ordinary things for each business? The core difference of such things at TRANSLIT is that we try to value cultural diversity in each of them: we always talk about respect, communicate the idea that each person sees things differently and it is great if we get to know about that.
So, TRANSLIT does not just provide language solutions – we’ve got culture solutions as well. If you’d like to see how it works, feel free to join our team and share our values together with us!
/By Irina Sergeyva // HR Manager, TRANSLIT//
