Event online mai 2026 (1260 x 539 px) banner website

The work that matters is waiting for the right specialist

Automated solutions have quietly reshaped the translation market. Clients increasingly route low-stakes, high-volume content through machine translation, but that's not necessarily bad news for language professionals. It means budgets are concentrating where they always should have been: on the texts that actually matter. The ones that are client-facing, legally sensitive, or simply too important to get wrong.

But to compete for that work, generalist positioning is no longer enough. Clients making high-stakes decisions want specialists, that is people who understand the subject matter, know the regulatory context, and bring something to the table that no automated pipeline can replicate.

This online event is about making that shift. Two speakers, two perspectives on what specialization really looks like in practice: how to choose your direction, how to build genuine expertise, and how to position yourself for the clients and projects that are worth your time. 🎯

Get your ticket now for 42 EUR or 200 RON.

Speakers

Ana Sofia Correia EVENTOS
Ana Sofia Correia

Ana Sofia Correia is a medical translator and writer based in Portugal, with nearly 20 years of experience in the life sciences and healthcare communication field. She has worked with pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, contract research organizations, language service providers, and medical communication agencies, providing translation, writing, adaptation, and linguistic validation services for a wide range of specialised content.

After 12 years as an in-house translator at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and the Nursing School of Coimbra, she moved into full-time freelancing in 2019.

Ana Sofia is currently Vice-President of the Portuguese Medical Writers Association (APMW) and Marketing Manager of the Women in Localization Portugal Chapter. She is also an active member of APTRAD, MET, TREMÉDICA, and EMWA. In addition to her client work, she writes the newsletter Perspectives on Medical Translation & Writing, co-authors the blog Med & Mark, and has led Medical Translation Mentoring since 2023, a programme created specifically to support translators specialising in medical and life sciences.



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Thomas Tolnai

Thomas is a freelance translator, reviewer and intercultural consultant with 18 years of experience, working from English, French into Romanian. and specialising in life sciences, IT, marketing, sound recording and reinforcement, logistics and automotive content.

He has strong opinions about work ethics, the translation marketplace and translator education, and he doesn't hold back from sharing them with the world. Although not an early adopter, Thomas is a tech-savvy professional relying on technology to streamline, simplify and automatise tasks.



Agenda

Saturday
16 May 2026 (all times expressed in CET)
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10:00
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Event Intro

Short welcoming message from the Team. 

Why and How to Choose a Specialization – and What to Do with It

Specialization has been a discussion point in the industry for years, and for good reason. It is still often approached with hesitation, as though choosing a focus might reduce opportunities or make a professional path too narrow. In reality, specialization does not close doors; it helps open the right ones.

This session explores why choosing a specialization matters, how to approach that choice in a practical and informed way, and what to do once that direction becomes clearer. It starts from a simple premise: when your work is too broad or too loosely defined, it becomes harder to communicate your value, build deeper expertise, and position yourself in a way that others can easily understand and trust. Specialization brings clarity. It helps you make stronger decisions, develop more relevant knowledge, and create a more coherent professional identity.

The session also looks at how to choose a specialization without treating it as a rigid or final label. Rather than defining a niche in narrow terms, we will consider it more broadly: in relation to the kind of work you want to do, the people you want to do it for, and the knowledge you need to do it well. From that perspective, choosing a specialization becomes less about picking a title and more about identifying a direction that makes sense in light of your experience, strengths, interests, and market reality.

Just as importantly, the session will address what comes next. Choosing a specialization is only useful if you know how to apply it. We will look at how to turn that focus into something visible and actionable: how to reflect it in your positioning, communicate it more clearly, align it with your profiles and materials, and use it to guide decisions about services, opportunities, and professional development.

Rather than presenting specialization as a constraint, this session frames it as a strategic tool: one that can help you move from being broadly available to being meaningfully relevant.



11:15
Short Break
Can You Teach an Old Dog New Tricks? Adding a New Specialisation Mid-Career, Guerrilla-style

Turning 40 and facing a mid-life crisis: sound familiar? For Thomas, it was the perfect excuse to do something bold and add a brand-new specialisation to his translation portfolio without enrolling in a formal programme or going back to school. He relied on curiosity, determination, and a whole lot of resources hiding in plain sight.

In this session, Thomas shares how he picked sound, music and acoustics as his new field of expertise and built his knowledge from scratch, using YouTube lectures, Skillshare courses, mind maps, product research and plain old note-taking. Along the way, he discovered that specialising isn't just about understanding theory: it's about knowing the market, the key players and the products that matter in your target community.

Whether you're a seasoned translator looking to branch out or simply wondering where to start, this session offers a practical, honest and occasionally self-deprecating look at what it actually takes to specialise, on your own terms. 🎧

12:15
Lunch Break
12:45
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Q&A and Networking Session
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