Friday morning, I (Ben) made the arduous trek from TransAction HQ to Doncaster to attend a mock business meeting with a group of year 10 students from Ridgewood school. Organised by Katherine Smith from International Business Communication (IBC) and Gill Beckett from CILT, the National Centre for Languages, the meeting was aimed at promoting languages in school and professional life. The students are all studying towards an NVQ in engineering with French, which they are studying alongside their engineering course so that they will be able to communicate and cooperate with overseas businesses in the future.

TransAction are no strangers to the IBC and CILT programmes, having welcomed several groups of students into our offices for hands-on translation workshops and language training. In fact, we were recently awarded a Global Entrepreneurship Week High Impact Events Badge of Honour (say that three times quickly!) for these visits. Upon arrival, I was introduced to the students who all greeted me in French and gave a very Gallic handshake. After the initial introductions, the ‘meeting’ was underway and the students asked questions (in French of course) about the work we do at TransAction and why languages are such an important part of what we do.

Despite only having started learning it this year, the students had an impressive level of French and were interested in how languages could help them in their careers and why it is important that we continue to teach languages in our schools. Following the questions, we had coffee and an informal chat with some of the students (still in French) before reverting to English for some more in-depth questions about the translation industry, my personal experience with languages and who’d been on holiday to France the most times. The whole meeting was filmed by Anthony from Last Phoenix Films and the video will be available on the CILT website (www.cilt.org.uk) in a few weeks – watch this space!

The NVQ programme that the students are following is an interesting development in language teaching, which has been at a bit of a low recently, especially now that they are no longer compulsory at GCSE level (which reminds me – I hope you’ve all signed the petition to have them reinstated as a compulsory subject- http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/TeachLanguages/). It allows students to study languages in a way that is relevant to them and to the subject and career choices that they have already made. This means that it is easier to engage the students and to get them interested in languages as a useful and important life-tool, as opposed to something in which they perhaps otherwise would not have seen a point.

Here at TransAction we are very keen on promoting languages both in schools and in the workplace, so this IBC/CILT initiative is something that we are very supportive of and we look forward to collaborating with them again soon!

Don’t forget to check back here or in our newsletter for a link to the video of today’s meeting!