By Anubhuti Gupta

The online summer internship at Modlingua.com was indeed an enriching experience in every way. It allowed us to give a push to our academic career by exposing us to a work like an experience when we are in the middle of our education. It instilled within us work ethics that will be of great help to us when we pursue work later in life. It was also helpful in making us aware of the work culture and gave us a taste of working in a corporate world under the guidance of Mr. Kumar and various other seniors from different parts of the world. The platform of Modlingua also gave us an opportunity to interact with various other people belonging to the “language learning community” around the world.

The program started with interactive sessions which were held online and all the interns were guided by Mr. Kumar as to how to go about the process. We were, next explained the importance of a professional profile in a translator’s career and thus our first assignment was to create one for ourselves which was published on Modlingua’s reputed website. These profiles were also shared on social networking site, thus giving the push to novice translators towards the professional world.

The next assignment made us put on our thinking caps and we were supposed to write an article about our impression on what we could make out from the given images. The one I worked on was a pack of wolves. It taught us the importance of group learning and group work in corporate jobs and other spheres of life. That assignment helped provide us perspective about various requirements of a corporate job and how it works.

The third assignment focused on various aspects of content writing, marketing, globalization, localization in the translation professional world. We were taught about these terms in a lecture online and we were asked to sum up our learnings in the form of an article. We learned a great deal about the professional aspects of translation of which were unaware of. I wrote an article defining and differentiating between Globalization, Localization, Internationalization, and Translation of content.

The fourth assignment threw light on the personal branding of a translator and about how to create and maintain a customer base. We also had the opportunity to interact with Prof. Ioanna through an online lecture delivered by her on the topics of personal branding and differences between a permanent corporate job and freelancing. Through this assignment, we were asked to share what we learned through the interaction and I took up one of the topics discussed by her and elaborated on it. The topic was personal branding. I discussed the importance of increasing visibility in the market for a professional and various ways of doing the same.

We, next had a discussion about the quality standards and its connection to translation services, the development of various quality standards in Translation Process across the globe, the equal roles of linguistics and non-linguistics aspects in translation and the quality standards function in this balance. We learned a lot through this online lecture about this aspect of Translation.

Our internship at Modlingua.com under the guidance of Mr. Kumar which lasted for the duration of around 3 months was a huge opportunity for us as language students and was overall a very knowledgeable and an enriching experience. It helped make us aware of our positives and our true caliber which we talked about during our activity of creating professional profiles. It further helped develop our content writing skills through the activity of blog writing. Also, it increased our visibility online thereby adding to the self-confidence in each intern. We also learned the art of time management as we were supposed to submit articles within the given deadline. Furthermore, it gave us access to the network of language learners and enthusiasts and thus access to information regarding our fields of study. We also learned the skill of advertising and promotion as we promoted Modlingua’s YouTube channel and Facebook page as a part of this internship.

I would take this opportunity to thank Mr. Kumar for his initiative as it provided us the opportunity to experience working as an intern.