The 2024 Orientspeak Team Retreat

Once a year we close the office for two days and bring everyone — full-time linguists, project managers, and our admin team — to one location for an annual retreat. This year we went to a coastal villa.

Most of our day-to-day work happens asynchronously across time zones. Lin runs our Asian languages team but works closely with translators in Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing. Natalia coordinates a network of European linguists from Lisbon to Warsaw. The retreat is the one time everyone is in the same room.

The 2024 agenda focused on three things: reviewing our consular partnerships and how to deepen them; planning the addition of dubbing services (which we launched in May); and a long, candid session on where AI tools have helped and where they have made our work worse.

Best part of the retreat: an unstructured dinner where translators who had worked on the same projects met for the first time. Several of them have continued to collaborate directly since.