This month LOTE’s General Manager Adrienne Meakin features in Virgin Australia’s Voyeur magazine. Adrienne shares her tips on success and the important role that communication plays in the path to accomplishing your goals.
About to take the reigns of LOTE as a second-generation business owner, enthusiasm and anxiety compete strongly for my attention. It’s the challenging moments when I’m grateful to be able to bring my dog into the office. Dash happily trots around, demanding pats, eyeing off lunches and greeting our translators at the door. Having Dash around is invaluable for our office culture. We seem to talk to each other more when he’s in.
The LOTE Agency was born when we saw a niche in the market to link high quality translated materials to strategic communication campaigns for Government, not-for-profits and corporate organisations alike.
Almost a quarter of Australia’s population was born overseas. Unfortunately, this audience is often considered too difficult to reach. LOTE exists to enable our clients to reach this often-overlooked market.
Different groups consume information in different ways.
For mainstream audiences, awareness campaigns traditionally factor in age, gender and interests. We add cultural background and language proficiency into the mix. We aim to give people from non-English speaking backgrounds the same opportunities for information consumption as English speaking audiences.
Creative strategy development is the part of my job I love the most. We produce everything from radio ads and corporate videos to animations and websites – and all in languages other than English. In doing this, I feel that we add heart to the delivery. Translation shouldn’t be an afterthought. There are so many diverse audiences, and each community prefers to absorb information in slightly different ways.
Team communication is a priority for me too. Like many businesses, we have regular one-on-one meetings to keep us all in tune with one another. However I recently stumbled upon another opportunity when my production manager and I started going for lunchtime walks. What was meant to be a fitness activity has become a great chance to touch base and chat casually about the health of the business.
‘Be prepared for and open to change.’
I recently read a book called Who Moved My Cheese? In it, cheese is a metaphor for what we want in life. The lesson I took from it was to always be open to change in business. Nothing stays the same, so to be successful you need to be aware of your environment and prepared for change. I really liked the simplicity and positivity of that.
I’ve been lucky enough to have creative freedom here. Starting out as the Marketing Manager, I had a branding vision for us. I wanted LOTE to be projected in a different light – not just as a translation company – but as a communication specialist for multicultural audiences.
While multicultural communication is relatively new in Australia, the translation services industry in Europe is well established. This year I’m thrilled to be travelling to Turkey to attend a globalisation and localisation conference. It’s going to be fantastic to meet other like-minded business people in a city as vibrant as Istanbul!
I saw, and still see great potential for us in this industry. With digital and high production quality media becoming more affordable, creative platforms for communication are only going to become more accessible and exciting for multicultural audiences in Australia.
