Natasa Stankovic, translation coordinator at Halifax Consulting - 170,000 pages of the EU acquis await translation

(Natasa Stankovic)

Halifax Consulting was founded in 2001 in Belgrade by international and local experts, who wanted to give their contribution to the development of Balkan as a region and Serbia in particular. For more than ten years, the company has been participating in the implementation of various projects in the process of our country's admission to the European Union, which is why a translation sector was formed in 2008 in addition to the consulting division.

In an interview with eKapija, Natasa Stankovic, coordinator of the translation sector at Halifax Consulting, speaks about the translation of a great variety of texts ranging from simple business correspondence to laws and other legal acts, which represent one of the most challenging translation tasks.

eKapija: You have been in the business in Serbia for 11 years. When and why did you decide to start a translation sector?

- In May 2008 we won a tender held by the European Agency for Reconstruction, the European Union agency that channelled all the funding for Serbia at the time. It was a two-year project for translation of 16,000 pages of EU acquis from English into Serbian, to harmonise our legislation with European law. Only when the job was already finished, we realised that the project was something more than just another one of numerous development programmes we had implemented. Whether we wanted it or not, it profiled us as a company that does translation and does it exceptionally well. Invitations to tenders started arriving, and now we have come to a point where we have a successful and high-quality translation sector.

eKapija: Your references show that you are very experienced in translation of laws, procedures and standards of the EU. What are the specificities of this kind of work?

- Translation of EU laws, procedures and standards is a challenging job. New terminology needs to be established in the right way so that it corresponds to our own legal practice and makes certain legal concepts clearer and easier to understand. We have been told by the Directorate-General for Translation in Brussels that there are around 170,000 pages of adopted acquis. Naturally, this number is increasing each year. Every candidate country needs to translate all of these pages before they can become members of the EU, so imagine the amount of work we need to do!

eKapija: You have translated national laws as well? Do only translators do this, or do you also need other professionals, like lawyers or economists?

- When we are asked to do basic translation with proofreading, then we engage linguists with experience in the required field. But they are still only linguists, not sector experts. Engaging experts depends on the needs of clients, the end users of the translation. If the law needs to be analysed by a professional body of the EU, then we are often asked to do a professional review. For this we hire experts in the specific fields.

eKapija: When it comes to translations not related to state matters, who are the most interesting requests, and what are the most demanding requests that you had from your clients?

- Recently we did a translation of moral and religious suitability for staying in the Holy Land. This was a very unusual and interesting task.

Also agriculture is an interesting and demanding subject – we have learned everything about good agricultural practice, crop rotation, animal welfare, etc.

But joking aside, this is one of the great things about translation – there are so many interesting and useful things you can learn while translating.

eKapija: How many people are there in your translation team and what are their professions?

- Our team consists of more than 130 translators, reviewers and editors. Most of them are linguists, but there are also people of a range of professions that have significant experience in translation.

eKapija: How many languages do you cover?

- We have never been in a situation where we couldn’t respond to a client’s request, no matter how difficult or ’exotic’ the language. In general, we have a solution for all potential languages, although mostly English, German, French, and ex-Yugoslav languages are required.

eKapija: What other services do you offer apart from translating? (review, editing...)

Apart from regular translation services, we also offer linguistic revision, professional review and editing. If there is need for a translation to go through proofreading done by a native speaker, we also provide this service. We also provide consecutive and simultaneous interpreters for meetings and conferences.

Then there is a host of related services we provide, such as certified translation, text scanning and treatment, developing electronic translation memories, localisation of texts, formatting and graphic work, everything down to conference organisation.

eKapija: What projects are you particularly proud of?

- This would definitely be, as we call it, the big EU Project of 16,000 pages and 50 translators, all of whom went through Trados or Wordfast training – this is computer-assisted translation software that keeps expressions uniform and consistent. This project lasted for 1 1/2 years, to the full satisfaction of the beneficiary – the Serbian European Integration Office, and the project funder – the European Union. We even finished it several months ahead of schedule.

We are also proud of our now almost two-year long and very successful cooperation with the National Bank of Serbia. We often translate very difficult materials with quite short deadlines, and until now we have dealt with all their requests successfully .

I have to point out that we do not separate clients and jobs into small and big ones. We approach every task in an equally serious and professional manner, and I believe our clients recognise this.

eKapija: What are your plans for the future?

- The first thing we are planning is certification according to international standards for quality management. The process of introducing standards is in its final stage, and now all we need to do is go through the control and issuing of the certificate, which we hope to complete by the end of the summer.

We also have plenty of new tenders coming up and we hope to be as successful as we have been so far.

We are also intending to further develop our cooperation with the private sector, especially in the fields of banking and finance, because we really have a lot of experience in those fields and exceptional professional capacities.