Preparing for the III Congreso internacional de traducción económica, comercial, financiera e institucional in Alicante has been a learning experience, not least because most (but not all) of the presenters in Spain will be academics—not my typical audience profile.

Fortunately I was privileged to be invited to the launch of ITI’s new Research Network on June 16, which was a distinct push in the right direction. Make that: a kick in the seat of the pants (so many facile stereotypes out there!).

And I naturally signed up for a few websites publishing academic work to peruse past and current research papers in the field, all the while sorting out issues related to a practitioners’ event focusing on financial translation that will take place in Brussels from July 4-6. (That’s SFT’s 9th Université d’été de la traduction financière, or UETF.)

All of which has shaped my contribution to the Alicante conference: “Dichotomies, differentiators and predictors. What mystery shopping can teach us about successful corporate translation”.

At this point, I’m particularly interested in under-reported predictors of (1) successful translation and (2) successful careers in translation, which I assume academics will be as interested in as practitioners.