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In this up-date:

Bi-Lingua celebrates 25 years of service
How to mess up your translation project
Intensive courses - do they work?

Bi-Lingua celebrates 25 years of service on July 1st 2010

... to my surprise, I might say. When I set up Bi-Lingua (initially called Chris Harris Language Training) I had no idea that we would still be around 25 years later, or that teachers working for us would actually retire (and we still have two who have worked for us since 1988!). Having worked for several years in major language schools, I had identified an unoccupied "niche" in the market: the big language school organisations were only interested in selling full-time intensive courses, which were very convenient for their planning in that a teacher and a classroom could be blocked out for the whole day, with no non-income-producing gaps. Secondly, little of the expertise built up by the very large English teaching industry (EFL) had percolated through to foreign language teachers (because there were few people around who both knew the languages and had the EFL experience to pass on).

So from the start Bi-Lingua concentrated on long-term flexible part-time foreign language courses, with teachers visiting the client company. This is what we still do today. And the quality of the teacher has always been our main selling point.

Our first-ever course was, rather unexpectedly, six months of Turkish for the MoD. After that things fell a bit flat, but the turning point came when, returning from a holiday, we found messages enquiring about language training on our answerphone from both Ford and Pirelli. One course led to another, and our success - and indeed initially our survival - was partly due to repeat business from those companies over several years. Courses for many other household-name companies followed.

About 5 years after we started out, we were approached by a patent agent asking if we could translate foreign patents. We said yes (you did in those days) and added translation to our service. In 1993, to get our translation business on a firmer footing, we joined the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, which sets the standards for the profession, as a Corporate Member, which we have been ever since.

How to mess up your translation project!

(Marketing types please read this)

Need some advice about translating your literature into a foreign language? Want to mess it up? Here are some useful tips:

1. Leave the translation till the last minute. A translator can do about 2000 words a day, so if you have 10,000 words to do, start looking for a translator 24 hours before your publication deadline.

2. Have your translation done by a machine. Translation software is getting better, and can be useful for giving you the gist of a foreign language document, but even the best is still way short of being able to produce acceptable advertising or brochure copy.

3. Alternatively, use an amateur translator. Ideally, if she has O-level French, the boss's wife.

4. Use a printing firm that can't handle the foreign fonts. (A tourist board I know did this, and, having refused our offer of a free precautionary proof-read before publication, went ahead and produced a brochure full of gobbledegook).

5. Get someone with a poor command of English to write the original version, so as to confuse the translator.

6. Pack your document full of acronyms and abbreviations only understood within your own company.

Job done! But not very well.

Intensive courses - do they work?

(CEO's and HR people should read this)

Within the language training profession, an intensive course means a full time, 5-days-a-week, morning-till-night course, often bearing a proprietary name containing words like "Total". And often taking place in the country where the target language is spoken.

These courses sound attractive, but are they as cost-effective as part-time courses, in terms of "language learned per pound spent"?

When considering sending a colleague on an immersion course, you need to add together all the costs:

• the actual cost of the tuition

• the cost of residential accommodation, if required

• travel costs, if the course is taking place abroad

• the replacement cost for someone to take over while your colleague is away from the office.

Taking all the above into account, the real hourly cost of tuition is likely to be at least double the net tuition cost quoted. But it's very doubtful whether your colleague will learn twice as much per hour as he would from part-time tuition.

The main disadvantages of immersion courses are

• once the student arrives on site on Monday morning, the school staff (even if some kind of prior assessment has been made) have to make a more or less instant decision about his ability and needs. If they get this wrong, it could be Wednesday afternoon before they've sorted things out and re-programmed. Worse still, they could even, by then, have established that the student is a "hopeless case". Either way, much money will have been wasted.

• there's little time on an immersion course for the student to assimilate, by private study, what has been learned, before new material has to be absorbed. (Analogy - think about pouring Guinness into a glass).

• the student is much less receptive in the late afternoon than he was in the morning (especially true of older students), but you, the company, are still paying the same.

• what has been learned quickly can be lost quickly unless the target language is going to be used immediately afterwards.

• worst of all, you may hear your CEO say "We've paid for Jones to have an intensive French course, so now he speaks French. Sorted!" (Sorry, but no. Learning a new language to a usable standard takes a lot longer than two weeks).

So, are there any arguments in favour of the intensive option? Well, yes, here are some:

• It gets the learner right away from the office, where he may suffer constant interruption, or from the home environment with its many distractions.

• if a colleague suddenly and unexpectedly has to be transferred to a foreign country, and the aim is to get as much target language into him as possible in the time available, regardless of cost, then an immersion course may make sense.

• some employees taking part-time courses may lack motivation and needlessly cancel individual lessons if, for example, they have an urgent report to write, so an intensive course is a way of keeping the learner's nose to the grindstone.

So what's the best advice to those considering an immersion course? The answer is: have some part-time tuition first. This will give the course provider much more useful information about the student's level and learning ability* (and enable you to identify the occasional "hopeless" case before you spend too much money), and will familiarise the student with language teaching methods, so that when he starts the intensive course he hits the ground running. Sending a complete beginner "cold" on an intensive immersion-type course is pretty crazy from the cost-effectiveness point of view.

In a later NewsPage we'll suggest how to predict language learning ability.