Year 8: ONLINE goes even more online!
COVID-19, lockdown! Everybody remembers the time that the world stood still. For a while it definitely did. We got covered in masks, stopped talking, touching, going out. We all got imprisoned at homes – which meant offices, schools, all life was moved ONLINE.
For many it was a real scare- what will happen now? How to work, how to live? For us…when it comes to MD Online, we did not notice such a big impact. We had developed as a truly online company, we had all systems in place. The only difference was dealing with children staying home due to online school, the same for many of our employees. This change came with their partners taking the space in order to work online too.
Despite the fact that we didn’t feel obvious organisational changes we did notice a clear decrease in the number of orders. When there are fewer orders then there is time to act. But how to act when you cannot go out, meet anybody, or even go on holidays? It was time to act ONLINE!
At that time what we felt most was being stuck at home. We developed an online company to be free from a fixed location so we tended to travel frequently- yet – we were stuck at home, with all international borders locked, with hotels and restaurants in the country locked…and even in the craziest of times, it included parks and forests! (yes!). With all the connections we had in the world we felt like it would be nice to get the feel of those far exotic locations at least in an online way- so that a translator in San Paolo could show the view outside of the window, tell us more about the place. And so we arranged such first “online travel” project. Our children absolutely adored it and then talked about it during their online school. Then parents wanted to provide the same experience to their children- speaking to people in far locations about their culture, weather, and animals a great way to feel you actually “went” somewhere exotic and at the same time great to exercise language skills.
MD Online (Dorota and Mark) and Leo Academy (Lucy and Lily) on one picture
LEO ACADEMY – Online English School
In this way, we developed LEO Academy, our youngest business baby, born out of a need to travel- even if it was purely online. LEO Academy, delivering English courses with native speakers for children, took a lot of our care and attention that year.
With new Zoom tools knowledge, we were using daily in LEO Academy, we also decided to develop an MD online series of webinars and a YouTube Academy. We focused on training translators in the use of CAT tools in order to further enhance the quality, consistency and speed of the translations.
When it comes to the main MD Online business (translations), after few weaker months, business quickly returned to previous levels- and above. There were more and more medically-related texts started arriving as the spinoff COVID vaccine developments. It was definitely the time that made a push for biomedical developments which needed to be translated into many languages by experts who know their medical English and other languages. And here we are coming smoothly into the next year…
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