Creativity… Re-Imagined is the name of the workshop I attended this month at the University of Lincoln. Led by Mandy Wheeler and Luke Sorba, it made us, creative people, look at our attitude at the time when we are faced with making decisions.
A lot of people generally crave creativity and most understand that progress can only be made if new things are introduced and tried out, especially in our day and age when technology is racing ahead. Yet, experience shows that we have all sorts of negative reactions when someone dares to introduce an unusual concept. Comments range from cautiousness and lack of belief to total rejection and mockery.
Why is that? People are not brave enough or too conservative to embrace change and the only way to deal with it is to transform the way we look at innovative ideas when they are presented to us: from being negative to being positive. At that workshop in Lincoln we took part in lots of training exercises, one of which was to respond to suggestions with “yes and” instead of “yes but” attitude. It may be hard work to radically change the way we work in a team or even on our own, but it can be done.
The translation industry is one of those areas where trends are moving on, some successfully and others not so. Some translators try out staff positions in translation agencies and multilingual companies, others prefer the freedom and flexibility of being freelance. Various initiatives are tested, from language cooperatives to online linguist directories, translators have no way of telling whether something will work out or not unless and until they try. This is something we discussed when I organised a networking lunch of interpreters in Lincolnshire this year and it is vital to have opportunities like that not just to chat but to bounce ideas off each other. Many great projects can be born out of a conversation between great minds which don’t just think alike but positively, too.
Interpreters in Spalding, Lincolnshire
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