With parallel career trajectories, connected by a strong entrepreneurial streak and the desire to make a difference, Paul Golf and Dr Christophe Fricker are well placed to co-create a new offering in the language space. Both Pathway Three academics, they each divide their time between teaching at Bristol and offering their expertise through their independent businesses and consultancy work as translators and interpreters, in high demand with clients across the world. Backed by a joint Enterprise Fellowship, they are now combining their skills, experience and ambition to explore how the University can strengthen its global civic endeavours by formally organising its multilingual language capacity.
You’ve both accomplished a lot in the commercial space alongside your academic careers to date. What drove you to adopt this combinatorial approach to your work?
Paul: As soon as I came out of my undergraduate degree, I wanted to leverage my interest and understanding of the Chinese world in an entrepreneurial capacity. I’d been working as a freelance translator during my studies and had done some tutoring. I realised there was a big need for my skills in the commercial space, facilitating business meetings and briefings, so I set up a consultancy for a time. I then worked with the Xinhua News Agency on an archiving project supplying universities, which eventually led to the connections that brought me to Bristol. I bring my entrepreneurial insights into what I teach, because a lot of students will become freelancers. Right now, I feel my experience in systems strategy could be useful here.
Christophe: It’s very simple – I love teaching, I love being a translator, I love teaching translation, I love reaching out to new people. When you set up a business, all of a sudden, you reach out to a much wider spectrum of people than when you’re in employment – you need to get advice and support from people with different specialisms and skills. That’s what makes a company work and that’s what I enjoy doing. I enjoy talking to people from different walks of life. Being an entrepreneur allows me to do that. As a translator and a service provider, I’m motivated by supporting people to be able to use languages deliberately. Most of my teaching is around translation. I want our graduates, my students, to be aware and happy that when they use language as translators, when they produce a translated text, that text is a way of inserting something into the world that is new and creative, and that isn’t a replica or a faint echo of something that already exists. I want them to be proud and confident of something new and useful, and often beautiful.
The relational aspect of how you approach teaching and business comes across strongly in the projects you’ve worked on, and by the very nature of translation and interpretation as essential communication. How would you describe the importance of language?
Christophe: Language enables us to relate to each other, that’s something that we can shape. Imagine politics without language, or doing business without language, or social care or sports without language? It would be absurd. It’s a truism but it’s worth pointing out that language is our most powerful way of shaping the world and putting ourselves into it and seeing how we’re connected to it. Yet most people don’t notice it, in the same way we don’t notice the air we breathe, because it’s there all the time. But once you do decide to look at language use, you realise it is central to the way we make little changes in the world.
Whenever we meet someone new, whether it’s our in-laws, a family, a new type of community, chances are that people will speak in a different way from what you’re used to, with their unique rhythms, enunciation, terms and phrases. The same applies if we move to another country, a new neighbourhood, begin work with a new employer, and the way we greet and interact with people. All of these are pragmatic issues in language use, and they all contribute to the way we feel we belong, and the way we can make each other feel welcome, or the way we pass for legitimate, the way we acquire some form of credibility. I’m intrigued by the situation, the situatedness of language.
Paul: Anytime anything happens cross-culturally or internationally or multi-lingually, there is a demand and a need for language services. At every level of the supply chain, whether there’s a document that needs translating or a contract that needs to be signed or a sales order, legal information, travel arrangements, negotiation, absolutely anything that crosses language, culture or nation requires translation and interpretation, in every field of international business.
Tell us about your joint Fellowship – what’s the motivation behind your plans to develop a formalised translation service?
Paul: It’s something that we already do. The University has all of these X-factor components: we have extremely experienced, highly trained professional staff, we have hundreds of students who we train to specifically do the job of translation and interpretation, and we have a bridge into digital technologies, so the collaborative opportunities are huge. I’m a systems strategist, I’m passionate about creating structures that are much bigger and can take a lot of people with them. I have a conviction that we can make positive changes in the world. This is a key opportunity for us to provide a solution in this global space.
Christophe: A university that understands itself as a global civic university needs to realise that means being a multi-lingual university, and to create systems and processes to be multi-lingual in an effective and an attractive way. To do that, it needs to draw, to a significant extent, on the multi-lingual expertise of its current academic staff.
What are your own aspirations and ambitions for how you’d like to see your project evolve?
Paul: I have a nuanced approach to vision, I feel like when I look back on my career so far, the things that have worked have been the things I didn’t expect to work, and they worked in ways that I didn’t expect! The things that I’ve planned have tended not to work in the way I wanted them to. I tend to trust the ripples rather than trip on the future – I just think I’ve got a lot of rocks on my side of the pond, I don’t know what outcomes will transpire, so I’m just throwing as many rocks in and trusting the ripples. Ripples don’t happen if rocks don’t go in so they’ve just got to go in! That’s how I do everything. Of course, you have to strategise to have a sense of where you’re going. Equally, something could happen that could cause the whole thing not to work – and I say that from experience – so my relationship to strategising is one of humility.
I’ve also been very blessed to receive support and enthusiasm from people across the University while pulling this idea together. That has made me want to keep going. It’s been a hopeful and inspiring process to engage in. I’ve got stuff that I’m good at but there’s plenty that I’m not, so getting energetic teams together where we get the best out of each other, that’s what I love doing.
Christophe: I’m interested in the relationships between people and how we encounter each other, through languages. The language industry is booming, it’s one of the most dynamic in the world and is going from strength to strength, so that is a good sign and a good time to be a translator.
Paul Golf is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages. Dr Christophe Fricker is a Lecturer in German and Translation in the Department of German. Both are part of the Faculty of Arts.
What an inspiring interview!