In this post we will present to you what it means to be a ‘Commie‘ -i.e. Communication Trainee– at the Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament in Luxembourg. Through the words of Olga Jeczmyk, one of our former Commies, you will have the chance to peek into one of our Departments and feel what it is to be part of our team:
It has been an incredible pleasure working, planning and managing the Communication Department of TermCoord for the last six months.
Since the very beginning, my duties were:
- to reorganise and harmonise the formatting of the amazing TermCoord website (which is full of great material);
- to act as Content Manager by creating articles and posts for the website’s blog;
- to promote and disseminate our suggested articles and websites through our social media channels;
- to communicate and to exchange correspondence with our readers;
- to collect terminology-related resources (recommended readings, articles, eBooks, glossaries, information about conferences, etc.);
- to act as Social Media Manager by monitoring and feeding social networks and platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Scoop.it, Flickr, Paper.li, Listly);
- to also act as Webeditor by mantaining TermCoord’s website, uploading content, improving SEO, managing suscriber’s feedback, analysing statistics and developing a strategy for the website.
This work has translated into more than 50 articles that I have written and prepared for the website. I also had the chance to create a new category for the blog called #MondayReading, which every Monday brings to our readers a suggested reading on terminology, translation, interpreting and languages in order to promote specialised books, thesis and papers. I have also suggested to refresh an old article from the blog by editing it, adding a new banner, adding some interesting links to the content and publishing it on Wednesday mornings. We wanted (as Communication Department) to re-publish some of the old articles because they provide valuable content that may be of interest to our new readers. Finally, we decided to organise our publications by creating a shared publishing agenda in order to know what to do every single day.
Here you will find a list of all my articles classified by categories:
Furthermore, in November 2016, we organised the VIII EAFT Terminology Summit at the European Parliament in Luxembourg. All TermCoord’s team was working together in different organising tasks, such as preparing the brochures with the information about the summit, drafting articles about the speakers, helping the participants during the summit, working during the presentations to publish them in our website, taking pictures and videos, tweetting during the presentations to offer our readers live quotes and even organising a concert in the Philharmonie in Luxembourg. I had the honour and pleasure to play during the concert and I can’t even describe how special it was for me!
During my traineeship, I also prepared two different presentations; one analysing TermCoord’s results on its Social Media platforms and the other one on the topic of “Terminology Blogging and Social Media”. The objective was to analyse what we were doing at the beginning of my internship and to find a communication strategy to increase TermCoord’s presence in the web. Thanks to this analysis, to our work together and to our passion for terminology we reached more than 41,000 visits in March 2017, which meant a historic record for our website!
After my experience in TermCoord I can say I have learned from the best team of specialists and from great friends. I am very proud of having been part of the TermCoord’s Family, as we all share the same values and we all follow the same goals. I recommend you to apply for a traineeship and to discover how TermCoord works, how it is structured and how many useful things you can learn from them in a fantastic atmosphere. Just enjoy!
Thank you for everything Rodolfo! See you soon TermCoord’s Family!
Written by Olga Jeczmyk: Translator-Interpreter, Webeditor, Social Media and Content Manager as well as a former Communication and Terminology Trainee. Terminology Coordination Unit of the European Parliament in Luxembourg. PhD candidate at Autonomous University of Barcelona researching in Cognitive strategies for the resolution of translation problems.