The Enterprise and Innovation Blog

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.

Professor Marc Holderied has devoted more than 20 years of his life’s work to understanding how bats have evolved and what their extraordinary abilities can teach us about adapting to our ever-changing environment. Building on this rich foundation as a sensory ecologist and bio-acoustician, he is gathering a team of fellow researchers and commercialisation experts who can help to take his work on bio-inspired sound absorbers to the next level.

This Enterprise Fellowship project has the potential to bring significant benefits by solving the social, health and environmental problems of urban noise pollution. Not only that, it’s one that Professor Holderied believes provides yet more evidence for the attention, respect, care and wonder that nature deserves.

You’re renowned for your work on wildlife acoustics and acoustic camouflage. When did you first become interested in this, and why does it continue to inspire you?

I always wanted to be a scientist, even before I could pronounce the word! For my ninth birthday, my aunt gave me a nature guidebook that I took everywhere, identifying everything I could find. My passion for bats started when I was around 17 when I went on a winter bat count. At university, there was a professor whose specialism was bioacoustics, in particular bats, and it was just the perfect match – from then on, it was all about sound.

Bats are the most fascinating mammals, for the simple reason that they do two things that no other mammal does: they can do active flight and they can echolocate. As a result, there are so many more constraints on the standard mammalian design that they have had to implement, with amazing special adaptations.

Then there is this whole hidden world available to them because they see with their ears. I find it fascinating that bats have control over what information they receive. That adaptive sensing is an intriguing implementation of physics into biological behaviour, which can be linked to the physics of sound manipulation – there is so much that has gone into this that can inspire bioinspired engineers for a long time.

Of all the investigations you’ve been involved in and the discoveries you’ve made, what do you consider to be the most striking?

What has really kept me busy for the last decade is the evolution of echolocation and examples of convergent evolution. There are organisms out there that want to manipulate how their echoes sound to a bat to suit their own ends – in the same way that a flower manipulates our visual perception by producing colour, there are plants out there that want to be found by bats as they are pollinators. We have studied the echo-acoustic equivalent of colour in these bat-pollinated flowers. Now we mainly work with organisms that don’t want to be found by echolocation – prey insects.

There are nocturnal insects out there that have no ears to detect bat calls – they have to depend completely on passive defences. The ones with ears obviously have an advantage, and theoretically, insects without ears should be easy prey.

Professor Marc Holderied with a ghostly silkmoth

This led us to look at moths, specifically silk moths, which have no other defences and completely depend on their very furry bodies. We found that when their furry exterior was removed, their echoes became much louder, suggesting that the fluff on their bodies absorbs sound and prevents their detection by bats. But how can they equally reduce echoes from their wings without compromising their energetics or aerodynamics? The body fluff would be too thick. We discovered they have evolved a very thin structure of overlapping scales that dampens the sound they reflect back to bats at a rate that is about ten times better than any sound absorbers humans use, for noise control for instance.

Moths have effectively evolved an acoustic metamaterial with emergent properties. We now understand enough of this mechanism that we can replicate it with the aim to make our world a less noisy place.

Your Enterprise Fellowship is focused on exploring the commercial potential for this bio-inspired noise control solution. What do you hope to achieve?

Noise is the second-biggest environmental health risk for humans, particularly in urban Western environments. In Europe alone we lose over a million years of healthy life through noise every year. The UK government estimates that the negative health losses – including cardiovascular disease and blood pressure – and the societal costs of road noise alone are higher than the cost for all the road traffic accidents (that’s in England alone), causing an annual bill of over £9 billion.

The promise of the moth wing is that we can create a sound absorber that can provide a level of absorption at a fraction of the space requirements, and hopefully produce a product that people can put in their living rooms to improve their living conditions.

That’s our mission – to make the world a quieter and healthier place.

Did you always have a commercial output in mind when you began working on this?

Personally, I’m a curiosity-driven researcher – I want to know ‘how’. My primary motivation isn’t that I want to be an entrepreneur, I’m perfectly happy discovering things. But I also don’t want to be the person who has lots of regrets from not even attempting something new.

I stumbled upon this nugget of gold, and the Enterprise Fellowship came at a perfect time, when I was looking at commercialisation ideas. As a professor with a very dense teaching load, the prospect of having to do a full CEO role on top of my full academic role is impossible. The Enterprise Fellowship scheme is fantastic because it gives buyout to my department and will be run like a sabbatical, which allows me to reduce my teaching load and invest a substantial amount of time into enterprise activities.

Your work in reverse engineering seems a potent example of how invaluable nature is in teaching us how to survive and thrive through adaptation. What other lessons do you think we can learn from this?

I’m a very engineering-inspired biologist, but I’m a naturalist too, so I’m saddened by the loss of insect biodiversity. Everything that is diminished means fewer things for us to study and discover, so this loss of wildlife is an immense problem for ecosystem stability. From an ecological standpoint, we need to have a readiness to defend every organism that lives and shares our habitat with us. But from a very selfish standpoint, if we lose them, we lose all the ingenious inventions that they carry with them, without us even noticing.

There is great awareness about the importance of nature in terms of proteins, genetics, chemical defences and antibiotics. Here, we have found an example of how sensory ecology can help make our lives and our environment much healthier and better in general.

Everything in the ecosystem has a role to play, is a brick in the building, and if you lose one after the other, the whole thing eventually collapses. Moths are beautiful creatures and beneficial in many ways; my hope is that more people will realise that.

Marc Holderied is Professor of Sensory Biology in the School of Biological Sciences. He is also a member of the Cabot Institute for the Environment, and Bristol Neuroscience.

Making sense in a global society: how language is shaping the future