Bridging Language Barriers In the MICE Industry

Oct. 29, 2010 - PRLog -- The MICE (meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions) sector has seen exponential growth over the past few years. In 2008, despite the gloomy financial climate, Singapore’s business travel sector bucked the prevailing trend of industries reporting reduced profits, hitting a new record as the number of business and MICE visitors hit 3 million, and tourism takings snowballed to almost $6 billion.

As Singapore moved out of the recession in 2009 and has registered consistent and positive growth since then, this trend looks set to continue moving upwards. Singapore’s strategic location, state-of-the-art venues and availability of world class infrastructures have made Singapore a premier MICE destination and for the third consecutive year, Singapore also topped UIA’s Global Rankings 2009 as the top city for international meetings.

Along with the booming MICE industry, interpretation services have also experienced a significant increase in demand. The growing number of foreign delegates making their way to Singapore has led to event organisers partnering global content management firms for their communication needs.  Professional interpreters are a fixture of such events to ensure that non-English speaking delegates can fully benefit and participate in these events.

Nicholas Goh, CEO of Verztec Consulting Pte Ltd, a leading global content management service provider confirms this, “Our portfolio for conference interpretation has grown by about 50% in the last two years. We have also noticed a marked increase in the number of enquiries about our interpretation services.”

Competent interpreters help to ease communication barriers and allow everyone to benefit from the presentations, and a good event is often judged on that basis. In 2010, Verztec interpreters put their expertise to good use at IE Singapore’s Africa Singapore Business Forum and the International Metalworkers’ Federation meeting , just to name a few. Verztec was also the official localization partner of the recently concluded Global Entrepolis @ Singapore 2010, providing interpretation services that enabled Mandarin-speaking delegates to fully grasp and contribute to the discussion topics at every stage of the event.

“Conference interpretation is definitely here to stay, as the success of each MICE event hinges on ensuring smooth and effective communication”, Mr Goh elaborated on the reason for the growing demand.As delegates from all over the world continue to make Singapore their destination for global sharing sessions, you can put your bet on conference interpretation as an industry that will mature together with it.

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International ISO9001:2008 Certified Provider of Global Content Management and Localization services in over 60 foreign languages. Visit www.verztec.com