Higher education involves a process of intense theoretical learning, but also an opportunity for gaining both work experience and practical skills. Student internships are an integral part of education, as they enable the gaining of knowledge in real work situations.
Apprenticeship programmes can vary significantly between companies, in the way they are organised, their duration and the type of tasks. However, they all share the common goal of preparing you to successfully enter the labour market.
Coffee making in practice? Not at Skrivanek!
Here at the Skrivanek Translation Bureau, we attach great significance to the training related to new resources, all part of the work faced by translators and post-editors today. That is why we have been running internship programmes in fields like philology or applied linguistics for many years. Most of our tasks have so far involved people learning English, French, German and Russian, as these are the languages that have been in greatest demand. To meet the continuing changes in the translation market, in 2023 we introduced an internship programme for those studying more exotic languages.
We have already had the pleasure of testing students from various academic centres across Poland who are studying Chinese, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian. We are currently already working with our 4th round of trainees in unusual language combinations, with each placement lasting 10 weeks and taking place remotely.
We typically begin the task by selecting around 10 students from all those who apply. Our Vendor Community department then takes care of completing all the documents necessary for our apprenticeship process. Once we have all the documents completed, we can begin work.
In order to get to know you as well as possible, including your preferences in terms of the type and subject matter of the assignments, we ask you to complete a short pre-survey. Next, we organise an online meeting where you can ask our project managers, who are also your placement supervisors, useful things like the timetable, the rules for the placement, as well as analyse the questions and answers involved in the pre-interview questionnaires.
Innovative technologies in the translation industry
The next step involves becoming more familiar with the order transmission system that we use here at Skrivanek and perform some test tasks.
During the apprenticeship, in addition to performing standard translations, you also have the opportunity to try your hand at post-editing machine translations, creating subtitles for a film or copywriting, as well as learning the basics of SEO.
All this includes learning how to utilise the latest technologies to generate text and images using free AI tools. You can then use all that you learn for automatically prepared film subtitling or automatic transcription.
Necessary feedback
Each task completed during the practice is checked by an experienced proofreader, who is also a native speaker. After each assignment, you receive vital feedback from your tutors to keep you on track. All our students approach the tasks with great enthusiasm, enjoy learning new things and, during their placements, see visible progress in their language skills. They also acquire theoretical knowledge to help them further develop their skills as translators.
At the end of the placement, you will again be asked to complete a questionnaire – this time summarising the 10 weeks of your work. This can include your observations on the internship, evaluate your partnership with your internship supervisors and give them valuable hints to use in future internships.
If you are a philology student and need to complete an internship as part of your studies, or you simply want to prove yourself and expand your translation knowledge, then do not hesitate – contact us today: https://skrivanek.pl/o-nas/kariera/