Hi there! My name is Dominika Nemesova, and I am a second-year student at the UvA.
From the 6th of February till the 6th of July 2022, I was pleased to work as a Marketing Intern for Straker Translations located in Amsterdam (Dam Square!), The Netherlands. In this blog, I would like to talk about my experience.
Straker Translations was founded in 1999 as a technology company in New Zealand. Since 2010, it has officially become a translation company when it saw a gap in the technology-translation market. Nowadays, the company is one of the world’s leading translation services providers with many global offices worldwide. For example, in Spain, The Netherlands, the USA and Japan.
I was instantly interested in this position right after the interview at the office as the company’s work is interesting to me. The company blends human and Artificial Intelligence to deliver fast and accurate translations. I have been interested in learning more about Artificial Intelligence since I wrote an essay about it during the Media Landscape course. Therefore, I was very excited to start this internship (when I heard I got hired) as I wanted to broaden my interest in how Artificial Intelligence work. Even though I was in the marketing field, I still learned a lot about how they use their machine intelligence to deliver translation workflows as I had to properly include it when making campaigns and landing pages, for example.
I had never worked as a full-time “marketer” before I joined the company. So, I was a bit anxious at first. I was worried that I might not be able to handle that much of a responsibility on my shoulders. But this feeling disappeared after a few days at the office as everyone was very friendly and kind towards me. The main marketer helped me with everything I needed and advised me on every task assigned to me. At times we had colleagues visiting from other offices (for example Barcelona or Philadelphia), so the manager organised dinners or lunches together. Once we even had a boat trip together! This was very pleasing as I could meet my colleagues on a more friendship level.
When it comes to the tasks, I have realised that what I study can be applied to any part of the business: marketing, corporate communication, PR, communications etc. Nowadays, Marketing is evolving to be rather digital and high data-oriented, analysing results, ROI and conversions was very important. So a good knowledge from the MCRS and SMCR course was very handy. Marketing is also very much aligned with the Persuasive Communication course. I was surprised by how many theories I can use when I was executing a campaign proposal, email marketing and social media posts. So if you are interested in Marketing, keep a good eye on this course!
If you would like to expand your knowledge or interest in the technology, translation, marketing and business fields, I believe that Straker Translations would be an excellent internship opportunity to enhance your practical and theoretical skills in these areas.