In late April it was once again time to pack my bags. Destination: Vienna, Austria’s beautiful capital – not for sightseeing but to attend one of Europe’s biggest translation and interpreting conferences.

The first day of the conference was held at the Gartenbaukino in central Vienna and consisted of several short TED-style talks. Various speakers, most of them industry practitioners, delivered short 20-minute presentations on different topics, from web scraping and data mining to the importance of CPD, neural machine translation and many more.

Day two was organised slightly differently: all attendants met up at the Mariott hotel and then attended longer presentations in four different paths. The line-up of speakers was fantastic and it often was hard to decide which session to attend. One of the most interesting topics I was confronted with was the meaning of legal regulations on the work of technical translators, and why we should know about the important frameworks in order to deliver a better service to our customers. Another intriguing session was a colleague’s report on what happened when he sent out satisfaction surveys to his clients.

After two days of extensive input, I am now back home and looking forward to the next challenges: my ITI translation exam and revamping my business practices to deliver excellence for my clients. But it was not only inspiration the conference gave me, it was also a great opportunity for networking and meeting colleagues from Europe and beyond. I am already looking forward to bp19 in Bologna!