"As a language service provider, we are not a black box"
Interview with Heike Leinhäuser, Managing Director of Leinhäuser Language Services GmbH
Heike Leinhäuser and her team of 50 experienced linguists serve numerous multinational corporations with the strictest quality requirements for accurate and target group-oriented drafting of their texts - from press releases and slogans to financially and linguistically complex financial reports. In the interview with Wirtschaftsforum, the entrepreneur and linguist revealed how she always finds the right tone and what changes AI is initiating in her daily business.
As a modern service provider, we do not limit ourselves to text formats alone, but also engage in cross-media subtitling of product and corporate videos.
Wirtschaftsforum: What role does artificial intelligence now play in your day-to-day business?
Heike Leinhäuser: Except when texts are classified as confidential or secret, in which case they must not be used for machine learning processes for IT security reasons, we use generative AI or Large Language Models in almost all our workflows today. We now consider it somewhat as an additional team member that makes our work easier. However, this is not a fundamentally new development for us: Professional translators and linguists have been working with terminology databases and glossaries as part of Computer-Aided Translation for decades. I therefore do not believe that AI will make our profession obsolete. Rather, it will enable us to work even more quickly and efficiently - and of course, we welcome that. We will also continue to adhere to the multiple-eye principle, which our company has always relied on for sustainable quality assurance: The final word - and thus the responsibility - always lies with a linguist or account manager.
Wirtschaftsforum: When it comes to texts for the public, it is not only linguistic accuracy that matters, but also the appropriate tone, which perhaps no one knows as well as the company itself. Why do your customers still trust you as an external service provider?
Heike Leinhäuser: Most of our clients operate at a very high linguistic, professional, and intercultural level themselves and could probably implement the work we do for them in-house. However, they turn to us because we can relieve them in a targeted manner over time, and perhaps because, due to our experience, we may have fewer blind spots. At the same time, we want to convince our partners with a particularly strong quality argument: All our account managers are linguists themselves and can therefore engage in a professional dialogue with our clients at any time.
Many of our client relationships have also existed for many years, so we often understand each other blindly. With new clients, we like to obtain comprehensive briefings to ensure we hit the exact desired tone of voice. As a language service provider, we are not a black box, but rather rely on intensive collaboration. In addition to our team of 50 permanent employees from a total of ten nations, we rely on a network of about 400 linguists from around the world to access the appropriate expertise for each project.
Wirtschaftsforum: How does the passion for language of Leinhäuser Language Services GmbH also reflect in your personal biography?
Heike Leinhäuser: I am a certified translator for French and Italian, but later mainly translated texts from English to German. I am certainly a linguist at heart and, during my original corporate career at Siemens, I also learned a lot about customer orientation – an attitude that drives me to this day and from which I founded the company 28 years ago. We are not in the forefront with our services, but for our clients, especially in particularly complex topics like financial reporting, we are often the rock in the surf. This joy in providing good service, along with the multiple technological advancements and passion for linguistics continue to drive me personally, just as the continuous feedback from my team, without whose dedication and expertise our company's success would never have been possible in this form.
Wirtschaftsforum: Ms. Leinhäuser, you and your team describe language as your passion and technology as your tool - how do you use both?
Heike Leinhäuser: We are comparatively sharply positioned in the international text and translation market and primarily cater to large corporations: Our direct contacts are usually the traditional staff at the executive level in areas such as HR, Financial Reporting, or Legal, for whom we often translate content-wise very complex texts, or the marketers and communication experts when we work on press releases or other texts for the general public. In the latter context, we also offer a variety of services beyond mere translation: for example, so-called transcreations, when we transfer shorter slogans or claims meaningfully but authentically into the target language, but also adaptations of longer texts, where beyond linguistic correctness, a target group-appropriate, intercultural approach is of utmost importance.