Over the past year, office life at Yamagata Europe has evolved into a remote, online experience. The same goes for our internships. Recent Yamagata Europe interns Valérie and Andrea give us an idea of what it means to experience a remote internship at our company.
At Yamagata Europe, we always love to work with interns. In addition to an extra set of hands, interns tend to bring new insights and positive vibes onto the work floor, and in some cases, they even end up becoming part of the company. For the interns, it’s a great way to experience a real working environment, and to expand their resumé. But what happens if that internship needs to take place remotely, removing all aspects of physical office life?
Andrea
Andrea joined our team for a few months to support our marketing team. In the past years, she had already completed a number of internships, but working at Yamagata Europe was her first remote work experience.
Valérie
Valérie worked on localization quality assurance and post-editing projects. For Valérie too, the internship was a fully digital one.
Being part of the team
The physical aspect of the office may be lost, but can office life still be social? And can Yamagata Europe still make people feel part of the team?
Andrea: “During the first two weeks of my internship, I had a video chat with each team leader. This helped me to understand better what Yamagata Europe was all about. And it was a nice way to get to know some of the team members I would later communicate with via email.”
Valérie: “My experience may not have been a typical internship, but there was plenty of screen time with colleagues that made up for that. Even through digital communication, you can tell that Yamagata Europe has a friendly atmosphere, and during video calls, there was always a healthy dose of casual conversation.”
Learning new skills during internships
An internship is the ideal opportunity to learn new skills and gain new experience. How did that work out?
Andrea: “During my internship, I have been able to improve the skills I acquired at school, especially in the fields of search engine optimization and advertising. I also had the opportunity to work with a CRM system, which was new to me.”
Valérie: “I was a little uncertain about my Spanish skills, because I had used the language so little during this past year. But during my traineeship, I have become more confident in my abilities. I also learned to work with some of Yamagata’s own software, such as QA Distiller, the company’s well-known quality assurance tool. I also helped to improve the quality checks and error correction steps of an automated machine translation process.”
Future plans?
With an experience at Yamagata Europe under their belt, what are our interns’ plans for the future?
Andrea: “My dream is to become an event manager. I would love to organize business events, ranging from international fairs to company events for personnel and customers. The marketing tasks I learned during my internship will come in handy, because organizing an event also implies marketing the event.”
Valérie: “I have always wanted to work in the translation industry. As an avid gamer and binge watcher, it would be cool to have a job related to the localization of audiovisual media: subtitling, dubbing, voice-over, game localization etc. During my internship, I mostly had to work with technical content, which I wasn’t necessarily interested in. However, I quickly adapted my mindset and realized that I could actually see myself doing this kind of job after graduation. Thanks to this experience, I can see myself working in other parts of the translation industry too.”
Thank you, Andrea and Valérie, it was a pleasure to have you on board!
