Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Official Report 458KB pdf

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International Trade Inquiry

Thank you. I want to understand some of the issues involved. If I were a small company thinking about going into an overseas market, how would I find out about the services that are available? How would I avoid making mistakes such as picking the wrong type of support for translations?

Our experience is that when companies employ somebody in marketing who knows what they are about to engage translation services in particular, that is a huge advantage, because they have identified a need. If the marketing person comes to us, we will definitely talk through the issues, the context and the background. If you just look somebody up in “Yellow Pages”, you could end up with completely the wrong providers, because of the specialism that is required.

When we started out several years ago, we tried to market our product but found that our marketing fell on deaf ears. In fact, our business comes from referrals. As a member of the Federation of Small Businesses and the local chamber of commerce, I have to say that networking is a great way of getting the message across.

You anticipated my next question, which was how much of your business comes from referrals. Do you get referrals from other companies, the chambers of commerce, the FSB or some of the public agencies such as Scottish Development International and the enterprise agencies?

Good morning. We are familiar with Scotland’s current export patterns, with the USA and the major European countries at the top of the list. Do you find a lot of people seeking services in that direction? The BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—are coming through as potentially big markets, which means that Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, the Indian languages and Russian will become more important. Are the translators with whom you work geared up for that? What has been the experience with the usual European languages? In contrast, how are your services lining up to meet demand from the new potential markets?

Absolutely. It is astonishing how many specialists there are in Scotland. However, for written translation, it does not matter where people are, because e-mail is a wonderful thing. If companies want to follow up translation with interpreting, it is vital to have people to hand. In cases in which a delegation is going abroad, for example, through our networks one can source people on the spot who would be able to help. The more networks and databases of people are built up, the better that will be. There are many more people with such skills than one might imagine here in Scotland.

10:15

Another interesting point that you made in your introduction was that there is a contrast between the model in Britain, where interpreters are generally self-employed and contract with companies, and the continental model. Does that contrast suggest to you that the sector is less well developed in this country, or is it simply that a different business model has developed here over time?

Clearly, your company and companies like yours have a role in challenging such misconceptions. Could the public sector play the same role? Could the enterprise agencies, for example, do more to inform companies about the kind of support that they might need?

Definitely. As I have pointed out, another misconception is that it is easy to get things translated. Then people use some online tool and what comes out is gobbledygook.

One more misconception is about how specialised the specialists are. The fact is that they are highly skilled and deserve to be paid a decent amount of money for their work. When we tell people who come to us what our rate is, they often say, “Oh no! We can’t go with that,” or think that translating just one thing is enough. We need to get across to companies that this could be an on-going process that would have long-term benefit and that the people out there who can help are highly trained, very experienced and potentially a great asset.

You also mentioned the networking opportunities that membership of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce offers to companies such as yours. I know that it has an international wing, but does it make its members aware of how the services provided by your company and companies like yours need to be valued, taken seriously and paid a serious rate?

Before I bring in Stuart McMillan, I want to follow up an issue that Lewis Macdonald touched on. Is there a single directory or web portal that contains all the advice and information about the companies in Scotland that provide these services?

No.

Yes. For a while, the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce was talking about having a database and indeed was gathering names for it. However, I have not heard anything about that for a while.

If there were such a thing and if people who were beginning to set up businesses or investigate the overseas market were made aware of how it could benefit them, it would be a very positive move. The ITI has a web portal that lists all its members, but people do not know that it exists. If you know that it is there, you will be able to find someone. Likewise, there is also the Institute of Linguists, which is based in England but serves the United Kingdom. Again, though, people do not know that it is there.

Good morning. I have really enjoyed what you have had to say this morning. I studied languages at university and I remember only too well all the red marks that I got over my attempted translations of French and German, so I fully understand your point about translating not just being about translating words but having a cultural aspect as well. I hope that anyone who reads the Official Report of today’s meeting will also take that point.

I have a couple of points to query following on from some earlier evidence. In his evidence to us last week, the German consul general gave the example of the lack of Scottish businesses taking part in trade fairs in Germany. He had the impression that many companies are afraid to take part because they do not speak the language. That is quite a strong point.

Marrying that point up with your view that advertising does not seem to work, that the best way to get business is by networking, and that companies seem to be scared of going further afield to sell their products and services, what could your company and industry do to get your message across about the facilities that you can provide to assist companies?

I was talking about this to the chairman of the local ITI yesterday, who is also on the national committee. The ITI has been talking to Westminster, but it has not talked to any of the devolved Governments. It realises that that is a big gap; the professional body realises that it should be doing that.

Active and live presentation to show what can be done often opens people’s minds. Sadly, language education in schools is dwindling because languages are perceived to be a hard option, so people decide to take film studies or something that is more fun. That is happening across the board in Scotland at the moment. The business clients whom I deal with in training, in particular, will say to me, “If only we had realised, we would have kept our languages on.” As a language graduate, you will appreciate that.



10:30

The business community does not necessarily want specialist linguists in their businesses; they want people with languages alongside their other skills. That will help, for example, if we are sending somebody to give a presentation. If there is somebody who has knowledge of the language concerned, they are the obvious person to work with, but if nobody in the company has any awareness of how language skills can help, it is a much harder battle.

Again, it would help to go right back to the beginning and to go into schools and to preach that message to kids. That would mean that in the future the workforce would be aware of the issue. As you say, there is a great fear out there that is partly about people never having had language-learning experience beyond very basic stuff at school, so they are embarrassed and scared and do not want to put themselves forward. If there was a means of talking to the companies, that problem could be surmounted, at least partially.

Across the board—taking into account private clients as well as business clients—the most common demand is for Spanish. That is partly because of holidays—that is the private market—but mostly because the South American market is on the rise. Chinese and Japanese are common, too. With those two languages, the cultural aspect is a huge factor. The marketing man of a high-tech company that has been tendering for a contract in Japan told us that, in six months, he has learned such a lot that he knows that the process is continuing, and he was able to jump in and save his boss during a meeting in which he understood that his boss had inadvertently said something insulting and was about to lose a deal.

Is it hard to find people who can assist you with certain languages? What languages would those be?

It is important to say that, if we cannot find the right person, we should not be offering the service—we should tell the client to go to someone else. Especially where marketing is concerned, you could create a disaster if you did not use someone who is really on the ball.

Recently, we were asked for a Thai translator for a Scottish food technology company, but we decided that the translator whom we had used previously was not suitable. It took us a while to find the right person, and we had to talk to several people before we found the person. There are very few Thai translators in Britain, and we needed to use someone who understood where the Scottish company was coming from, which meant that the person had to be someone who lived in the UK. That is an example of a new language, as it were.

We were able to sort of turn them, as the spymasters have it, to work for us.

Is there more to be gained by making progress with immigrant groups, such as the Chinese, and working with people who have a competent and efficient knowledge of English within a particular professional area? Is it better to bring those people into our selling and interpretive systems than to rely on our conventional learning systems?

Are you aware of any grants that are available to companies that want to access services such as those that you provide?

We tend to think about the likes of George Mathewson and suppose that, because the board of Deutsche Bank conducts its business in English, everyone in Germany does. Nevertheless, it is crucial to know technical German. As you say, that is what instructions are now printed in—they are not printed in English in Germany because no Anglo-Saxon country does the manufacturing any longer.

I am the principal of the University of Dundee, but the context in which I am here is in representing Universities Scotland. I was recently elected as the convener of the research and knowledge exchange committee of Universities Scotland.

We tend to think of the role that universities play in international trade as being focused on overseas students and the export value of that trade, which it is, in effect. Members are well aware of that. We devoted some of our written submission to describing that part of our business.

We have views on public bodies such as Scottish Development International and the British Council, with its role in helping us with overseas students and with another area that I will discuss in a minute, which is the commercial value of our research activity. We made much mention of SDI and the British Council in our submission. I can comment on that further, but we have made our position clear about the support that they give—we are very positive about it.

I will emphasise another critical role that universities play in supporting exporters, international trade and overseas internal investment in Scotland, and it relates to our international reputation and our research activities. There are four important aspects. First, Scotland’s universities are one of our truly internationally renowned industries. It is not inappropriate to describe higher education, or Scotland’s universities, as an industry. It has many characteristics that we can recognise using that term. Particularly at this time, it is important not to neglect our universities and the roles that they can play.

Secondly, this is a time when Scotland needs to show an international perspective. Scotland’s universities have been doing that by expanding their international links and making that expansion a sector priority. They can do more, and will continue to do more, but it is important to understand that our international links and our power to catalyse things that are important depend on our reputation. Internationally, our reputation depends on the core support that we receive from Government.

Thirdly, the research and development strengths of the sector should be recognised as a tremendous asset for Scotland. There is a need to explain how that asset functions and needs to be supported. It attracts inward investment, and it is responsible for growing industry in Scotland. We have begun to work up papers on the adoption of higher education as the seventh key economic sector in Scotland—we have been developing ideas around what we call the knowledge services sector. That is an important concept to understand.

Lastly, universities have a role in economic regeneration. There are two important contexts to that. One is universities’ role as drivers for economic regeneration as we recover from recession; the second is their role in regenerating cities and regions in Scotland.



11:00

There is powerful university activity that is truly international in Edinburgh and other major cities in Scotland. In Edinburgh, it is sometimes harder to see the impact, but it is there. It is seen more clearly in places such as Dundee, where I am based. The university sector—both the University of Dundee and the University of Abertay Dundee—has played a leading role in generating a post-industrial perspective and in changing the perceptions of that city. That occurs elsewhere; Dundee is just the example that I know most about. When we examine those examples, we begin to expose the key role that universities play.

No, not necessarily students. I should make it clear that we are looking at delivering in country rather than necessarily attracting students here, which I think is a diminishing market. In the long term, we must look at how we work more closely with the Governments and the institutions to form collaborative ventures whereby we go out and work in country. Yes, we will bring people back in, but they will not necessarily be students. They could be trainers or the many people who might be involved in projects.

That is a worrying concern, given the statement in the Universities Scotland submission that income of some £400 million per annum comes from overseas students. If that market is diminishing, what will replace it?

That market is dynamic and changing. Carol Booth has described not so much a diminishing market as a changing approach to that market. Universities are participating in exactly that change in approach.

For example, we offer overseas students the opportunity not simply of studying on our courses here but, through key partnerships with other universities, of studying in their own institution as well as spending some time in Scotland. The duration of such courses varies—they can be three plus one or two plus two—as there are all kinds of arrangements. We also have several examples of Scottish universities that have established campuses in overseas locations, as Carol Booth has talked about with respect to FE.

As all those opportunities open up, universities and FE institutions need to be flexible and dynamic in their approach in order to maintain and develop market share. Universities Scotland believes that that market still has room to expand, but it will not expand if we remain static in how we approach it.

Do you mean the mix of funding sources?

Yes—and the issue concerns us. I know that there have been changes in the weightings, for example.

When we took evidence on the Chinese market, we were told that, particularly with education and training, we do fairly well in the main areas in China, but that there are issues in the markets outwith the main towns and cities. Does the university sector have enough knowledge about untapped and developing markets? How does information on those markets feed through to individual colleges and universities?

Carol Booth might like to answer that, too.

The development agencies can synergise with higher and further education bodies to generate that knowledge. We are talking about a vast country and market that has a hugely complex education system with huge variation in the quality of institutions, their individual missions and how they might interact effectively with Scottish institutions. Universities generally—and, I guess, the FE sector, although I am sure that Carol Booth will comment—do not have sufficient resources to map out all that in advance. We will develop our knowledge through the nodes that are established and we will undoubtedly work outwards, but assistance is required. For example, it would be valuable if the scouting that we need prior to our considering a significant engagement was co-ordinated.

11:15

In the past two and a half years, we have examined the Chinese market closely. We came to the conclusion that it would be extremely difficult for the college sector to enter the Chinese market, as the main areas have been covered. The level of English in the institutions with which we would wish to work is quite low, which makes it a difficult market for us to enter. We have chosen to go down the route of collaborating with the SQA, because it already has a strong foothold in the Chinese market. That is the way in which we will be best served in that market, and it will allow us to expand gently and get used to the culture, so that we can help the colleges to get in more effectively.

Within the past couple of weeks, a representative from a college in Scotland told me that there were too many colleges in Scotland and that, in order to make the market in Scotland a bit easier to understand and to enhance the marketing opportunities outwith Scotland, the number should be reduced. Carol Booth said a few moments ago that there should be more emphasis on vocational training. What is your response to the view that there should be fewer colleges?

There is a big need for vocational training in the international market and we would like to be able to offer more of that. The colleges need to be able to work together as a package for Scotland rather than independently. My agency tries to offer a single point of contact so that when international people look at Scotland, they come to the Scotland’s Colleges International team, and we can then disseminate information, questions and requests out to the college sector. It is not necessarily a case of needing fewer colleges; it is just about being able to access the colleges in Scotland more effectively.

An earlier witness suggested that there ought to be less French, but my impression of her evidence was that she felt that German should still be in the top tier of languages. She described German as the language of engineering. Is it your view that German should be relegated slightly?

That leads to another point, which is that we will inevitably see a very great amount of basic technical construction of machinery and so on carried out in China. Would it not be advisable to build an educational element into that so that teams would go out from Scotland and work alongside people in the factories—I am thinking of people at college level rather than university level—and derive the necessary linguistic equipment from that? We should remember that that was what the Chinese themselves did before 1997, when they came in very large numbers to industrial areas in Europe.

I make the minor point that, while the Government and others in Scotland have spent about five years trying to build 35 miles of railway line to the Scottish Borders, the Chinese have built a 600-mile express line over the same period, more or less from Beijing to Hong Kong. That gives some idea of what we can jump on to in China.

You have some reservations about the policies of the British Council. Do you think that our relationships with Germany, which is a large, technologically advanced country, were at all helped by the fact that, about seven years ago, the British Council closed down its entire provincial organisation in Germany?

I would say the same. I do not have enough personal knowledge to answer that question.

Education UK Scotland is the agency that is trying to do that in China and India. We are working closely with it, and the college sector funds some of its activity. We need to continue to work closely with Education UK Scotland to ensure that it completely understands the package of vocational education and training that we are trying to put forward. We are working with them on that and we are seeing quite good results from some of the campaigns that have taken place recently.

I have nothing specific to add to that comment.

What kind of activities do your sectors undertake and what interaction do you have with the British Council to try to inform it of the differences between the sectors in Scotland and England?

We have offered some practical training sessions in India with some of the British Council staff and the Education UK Scotland staff. That has been quite effective to an extent, but one of the issues is that they go back to their day jobs and tend to revert to their previous mindset. Because they deal mostly with the English system, they do not necessarily find it easy to differentiate between it and the Scottish system. We could do more to try to help if we could have access to more of the international British Council staff in one place at one time. Perhaps they could come up to Scotland. Something like that would help.

This will be totally outwith your control but, if more British Council staff were educated within Scotland, might the organisation have a better understanding of Scottish needs and concerns currently and looking ahead?

In addition to working with SDI and the British Council, do you work with UK Trade and Investment and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to ensure that they are aware of and are happy to promote opportunities in Scotland?

Yes, we have worked quite a lot with them. I have been on quite a few trade missions and I have very strong contacts with UKTI and SDI staff in some countries. Where appropriate, we use UK-level and Scotland-level staff.

With regard, say, to life sciences or the games industry, does UKTI promote Scotland equally or is it inclined more to promote what happens south of the border?

The colleges track and use some of their alumni—for example, the Indian, Chinese and other overseas students who have gone through the system—to keep up contacts and get in to talk to other people in those countries. The approach has been very helpful.

I welcome members to the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee’s 13th meeting in 2010. Before we start our business, I welcome our new senior assistant clerk, Joanna Hardy, to her first meeting—she has taken over from Katy Orr. I hope that she enjoys her time on the committee. We look forward to working with her in the coming months.

I have received no apologies. As usual, I remind members to switch off all BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.

Agenda item 1 is on public sector support for exporters, international trade and the attraction of inward investment. We will hear from two panels of witnesses on the educational aspects. The first panel has only one witness—it is difficult to call one person a panel but, in our terms, it is. I welcome Dr Alison Hiley, who is from Confluence Scotland. One barrier that has been identified to people getting involved in trade is to do with language and customs in other countries. Alison Hiley is here to tell us a little about what is available to people in the business sector to learn more about how they can communicate if they wish to move into the export business. I ask her to say a few words, after which I will open up to questions.

One thing that we have been trying to establish in evidence is how a Scottish business operating overseas will source different kinds of skills and advice from different agencies. When you do what you have described, which involves engaging with a company as part of its marketing effort in an overseas market, do you find yourselves collaborating with public agencies or competing with them? For example, when you deal with clients in the oil and gas market in the Russian far east or China, for example, do you work with SDI, or are you simply aware that the organisation is out there somewhere and you occasionally come across it in the course of giving advice to clients?

Do you mean from our point of view?

From the client’s point of view. The service that you have described is extremely holistic and involves you working with the client in a range of ways to improve their performance. This might be a difficult question to answer, but would you say that there are other people in the marketplace who offer services of the same high standard or are you exceptional as regards what is available to businesses that are looking for such support?

I would not say that we are exceptional, although it would be nice to think so. However, the vast majority of the translators work for themselves.

For what it is worth, yesterday I talked to a colleague who has been based here in Scotland for five or six years and who is up at the top of the profession. He has never worked for a Scottish company—he does not need to, as he gets the work in. Scottish companies have not come to him even though he is a specialist in information technology with German and Russian, which are languages that one would have thought would be in demand. It seems that, when it comes to how companies can reach us and how we can reach them, the communication is not working as it should.

Not really, although I have to say that I can speak only from my experience in this area. When I speak to people privately, there seems to be an awareness of that, but that is not the same as getting the message out to all members.

It has unfortunately—and temporarily, I hope—folded but, until just recently, there was a Lothian export club, which provided a platform that allowed all sorts of people to meet. However, I think that it was preaching to the converted.

If a database existed, what actions could your company take to promote it and your business as well? What would you recommend that the industry do to promote such a database in Scotland?

Unless the company is among the largest companies, it is unlikely that it would be able to afford to engage a specialist at the level that they would need, which is where the body of freelancers who are out there comes in. Only giant companies could afford such a section and could therefore afford more than one person. One person can operate in a specialised field, but even in that field there are likely to be more specialisms. If there could be some synergy between the different fields, that would be the best solution.

We have had as clients one or two really large companies that do not have such in-house departments. Many companies deal with several markets; they do not deal with only one country. We recently worked with a fish exporter that was going to a trade fair in Poland and therefore needed promotional stuff in Polish, but they were also fishing in north Africa so they needed legal documents translated for that. An in-house translator would have been of no use to that company unless the translator happened to be proficient in Polish, French and English. Companies that operate in a restricted field could operate with one in-house translator, but other companies probably could not.

You touched on getting the message across to small businesses or medium-sized enterprises. In terms of the way in which the public architecture deals with the matter, it tends to be local authorities that would work with smaller businesses—the business gateway contracts are dealt with by councils rather than by Scottish Enterprise, which dealt with them previously. What is the dialogue like between your industry and local authorities? Is it generally good or bad? Does it depend on the local authority?

First, I am sorry that I turned up rather late.

I have some awareness of the subject from having been a professor of British studies in Germany for about 30 years. In that time, we have built up quite a big link with Wales, which is the twin region of Baden-Württemberg, by setting up a Welsh studies centre that brings Welsh academics across to Germany. We even had some people in Germany learning Welsh, which really stretched the usual boundaries. To be blunt, however, we found that it was better to capitalise on the enthusiasm of the German students and their experience in coming here as assistants than it was to expect any great involvement by people in Scotland—or people in Wales, for that matter. The Germans who teach in Wales have an excellent command of German, but I am afraid that that is not always mirrored in Scottish students’ command of English grammar.

That is what I did in Tübingen. In fact, I was almost the dancing master for cultural acquisition. I found that the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, which is a technical university, sends nine students to Edinburgh Napier University each year to study various elements of Scottish engineering business practices, but no return party goes from Napier to study in a place that has five times the engineering output of Scotland relative to population. How can we remedy that?

10:45

As I said before, you need to go into schools and tell the kids who want to be engineers that that is great and that having some German will be of real benefit to them, because German is the language of engineering on the continent. They might want to learn Chinese, depending on which direction they want to go in. If they understand that when they are young and it is easy for them to learn, you are halfway there.

Information on who is selling abroad and who wants to sell abroad would be useful to us. Often, you are involved at a stage at which we are not involved. Somebody will ring up and say that they need a 3,000 word report translated by the next day and ask us whether we can do that. The answer will be that we cannot, unless the translator sits up all night. That is too late in the process—we should have been involved from the beginning. As you say, we need all the different advisers to come together and put things together as a whole.

Such grants are not available directly. If a company makes a case for it, a grant may be offered through the business gateway; however, the amount will be finite and the grant may be just to translate a website and not to do anything more. That is great, but it is only a start.

We need quite a brief answer to this, although it is quite a big question. We have been talking about what languages might be required in the future. Are we providing enough language education in Scotland, through schools, universities and colleges, and are we teaching the right languages for the future or do we need to think about changing the emphasis in the languages that we teach?

Yes. You are talking about instruction manuals, which are what translators work on a lot. If that work is done on the cheap, the instructions are not going to be helpful because they will not be correctly translated.

As in the case of translations from Swedish to English, shall we say?

Thank you very much for your time, Dr Hiley, and for a very interesting session. I am sure that it has provided some useful information for our inquiry.

10:50 Meeting suspended.





10:53 On resuming—

I am part of an organisation called Scotland’s Colleges, which is an amalgamation of Scotland’s Colleges International, the Scottish Further Education Unit, the colleges open learning exchange group—COLEG—and the Association of Scottish Colleges. That is a relatively new format for us. I am the manager for the international team, and my responsibility is to seek business, commercial and aid-funded opportunities for the college sector. Where possible, we assist with information on visas, recruitment and so on.

Thank you for those opening remarks. We will start where we finished with the previous panel. What are your views on language education in Scotland? Are we doing enough, and are we teaching the right languages at your level?

We have an advocacy role in how those arrangements serve us.

Our key point is about the relationships that individual universities have as clients with the British Council and about deriving the most effective analysis of key markets for us. That is what that point is about.

Should that kind of collaboration be co-ordinated with the help of SDI?

Is that in the light of a hope that increasing numbers of students from other countries will come here to study?

Many agencies have a locus in this area, such as Skills Development Scotland, Scottish Enterprise and SDI. Both of you have alluded to the fact that early collaboration is important. Do the many agencies that fund and support you have a deep enough understanding of the needs of colleges and universities with regard to their international work? Is the collaboration working? Could it be better?

Collaboration across the agencies could be a lot more effective. I am not sure that many of the people from those agencies that are based in country are aware of what the college sector in Scotland can offer, and they do not understand that we are trying to market a package.

In the course of my international travels I have come to realise that, at the moment, many countries need vocational education and training more than they need university education, because they need to develop their workforce. Many of our agencies in those countries do not understand that. They understand the university level extremely well, but they do not yet understand the college level. There is a lot of work to be done in that regard.

Resource is one thing that we need. A better understanding of the second and third-tier cities in the market would be helpful. We need to do a lot more research to understand what is needed, particularly at the college level.

We are a small team—there are only three of us—and it would be helpful if we had a bit more resource, if the education team at SDI had more resource and if there were training sessions for British Council staff and others in country who could help us to get our message across.

I have two brief questions, the first of which is for Carol Booth on a point of clarification. You suggested that the key languages were Chinese, Russian and Spanish, and that there might be less emphasis on French and German.

That is a helpful clarification. My second question is to both witnesses. We have heard a fair bit about China today and about some of the European countries. Are there any wild card countries out there? Are there countries that other people do not talk about a great deal but in which you think we should do a bit more?

I am more or less of the same opinion. We already have good, developing relationships in those areas in relation to oil and mineral issues, which fits well with an energy agenda—that is quite important in our university. In addition, I would not overlook South America.

In terms of South America, would you still maintain the supremacy of Spanish as opposed to Portuguese?

I am not a languages expert, so I pass that question on to somebody else.

That would be helpful. Also, from a cultural point of view, as we discussed earlier, that would help the college sector to get a much better idea of how it can work more closely with a country such as China.

I also make a plea for India. We are doing an awful lot of work in India, where the language barrier is not so great. We have also found it culturally much easier to work there.

Germany is a highly decentralised country but all its British representation, apart from SDI, which is in Düsseldorf, is concentrated within 1km2 in Berlin.

We can discuss that when we get to Düsseldorf.

I have a quick question. You mentioned the foothold that the SQA has established in China and how important that is. Part of the secret of that was the promotion of Scottish education as a whole. Is there a role for the SQA or another Government agency in creating the field in which universities and colleges can operate by promoting Scottish education as a whole?

Does the university sector have a view on that?

My question is for Professor Downes. Towards the end of your written submission, you talk about the UK dimension and raise various points about the support that is provided by the Scottish Government and your frustration with the UK Border Agency. Your final point is on the UK agencies and the Scottish Government agencies. You state:

“There is a continual need for these agencies to be aware of each other and to work collaboratively to best effect.”

You also talk about the leading role that the agencies play in some of the initiatives to promote the Scottish university sector, which is not always acknowledged in London. Can you provide any examples of initiatives that would have been promoted better by the Scottish university sector or the Scottish Government than by others?

The issue is relatively general rather than characterised by specific examples, and it relates to the fact that education in Scotland is different from education in England. Those differences are often not fully articulated or understood by all those who act on behalf of the UK-wide sector in the British Council. That is what I was trying to say earlier, but I did not make the point very well. That leads to a number of difficulties that we find ourselves correcting after the event rather than dealing with up front. Intimate knowledge of the Scottish education system as a whole is the important issue rather than any specific outcomes that result from that.

11:30

That would help, but my understanding is that, unfortunately, the British Council is reducing its staff by 30 per cent across the whole network at the moment, so I do not think that it is likely that it will take on many people with Scottish connections soon.

I would make exactly the same point.

As does the higher education sector. We are well aware of those contacts and, indeed, we will use all the levers that we can find to develop those business opportunities.

I could not agree more. Our alumni are important to us in many different ways, and our overseas alumni are particularly valuable. In our submission, we mention the value of influencing overseas students who study in Scotland and then go back where they came from to pursue their careers. Those people are the businesspeople of the future and we will not recover and benefit from the investment that we are making now unless we maintain those contacts and make clear the potential mutual benefit.

That concludes our questions. I thank Carol Booth and Pete Downes for giving us their time and some valuable evidence.

11:42 Meeting suspended.





11:48 On resuming—

I thank the committee very much for inviting me. I know that I speak on behalf of my profession of translators, interpreters and deliverers of tuition and training when I say that we are grateful to have awareness raised not only of the services that we offer and how they benefit business, but of what the process involves. There are many misconceptions as to how linguists work.

My company, Confluence Scotland, offers translation services and a training service, which is not in competition with the colleges and universities. We offer customised training for businesses for whatever purposes they have. It is for people in Scotland who deal with the overseas market in whatever shape or form, or for non-native speakers of English who live and work here. We tend to go into businesses, and we usually provide one-to-one training or small group training. The training is very much customised or tailored to the particular need. It might just be on e-mail, or it might be about how to get on in meetings or correspondence.

On the profession and how it works throughout Scotland, most of us are self-employed freelancers. There are very few large outfits providing services. We act as an agent for translators. They have to be specialised, because it is not in anybody’s interest to employ a jack-of-all-trades translator—that is no use, because the translator has to know the context in which they are working. Therefore, a translator living and working here might well work mostly for one company, but they will not be employed by that company; they will be engaged as a freelancer. The same usually goes for interpreting. The situation is different from that on the continent, where large engineering companies and other companies employ in-house translators, who are highly specialised, too. That is one major difference.

We also bring people over from Europe for study visits and courses on English language training to do with their business. In both translation and training, it is important that cultural awareness is raised. There is no point teaching somebody to speak a language or offer translation if they do not understand the culture and how to behave. One of the misconceptions about translation in particular is that any old translation will do; in fact, there is a multiplicity of possibilities. Specialists are needed because they know the field. That is particularly true with marketing; businesses ask us to translate marketing literature and promotional material.

The same goes for trainers. The colleges and universities employ full-time or part-time staff, but most trainers out there work freelance for different organisations. I hope that that is enough of an introduction.

Most of our business comes from referrals and by word of mouth. Obviously, that has to start somewhere, but in our case it probably started with networking rather than advertising, which does not seem to work. If somebody does not perceive that they need your service, direct marketing falls on deaf ears.

I speak on behalf of the professional body for translators and interpreters, which is the Institute of Translating and Interpreting, which has various regional networks, including a Scottish network. The professional body supports its members. One of the issues is how we raise awareness that we are out there and what the process involves. It is not just about people wanting something translated, sending it off and getting it back; you need to talk it through and discuss the customer’s needs and the context so that you can work out who the right translator would be. That translator then needs to do their own research. That is why it makes sense that we offer an on-going, supportive service, not just a one-off translation of a leaflet, for example. The translator who does the work will look into the background, will have the necessary specialist vocabulary and will look into the company and whom it is trying to reach. That is vital, because we can then offer back-up. For example, we can offer some marketing, because a native speaker, knowing the area, will be able to identify things that the company may not have identified. If need be, services other than translating text, such as phone calls and correspondence, can be provided.

I will deal first with the regular European languages. We try, where possible, always to source a translator who resides in Scotland. Theoretically, because of the electronic world, we can source people who are based anywhere. However, if an issue relates to Scotland, it is important that the translator understands Scotland, so it is better if they live here. Most of them have either come from the relevant countries or, if they are translators into English, have lived there for a long time. That makes a difference.

I turn to the so-called new languages. Within the specific industries to which we have offered services, such as the oil and gas industry and the drinks exporting industries, Spanish—especially South American Spanish—and Russian have been of importance. Over the past year, we have delivered training in Spanish to a drinks exporter. Just yesterday, it asked us to further that by helping some of its top executives to deliver presentations and to translate reports. That is an example of how we can expand the service.

With Russian, recently we were able to help people by translating a PowerPoint presentation, so that even if the presentation were delivered in English—which it was—it could be shown simultaneously in Russian. We have native Russian speakers here who are heavily involved with the oil and gas industry, for example; they are in Aberdeen or round about there and know what is going on. That market is definitely growing.

Are there sufficient people in Scotland to take on the work that is opening up in the directions to which I referred? If we are to be more effective, we must have the people here who are capable of producing such translations.

At the beginning, in the advice or exploration stage, we would certainly ask what paths SDI had taken. We know that SDI is out there helping people, but we do not deal directly with any of the public agencies because we are not asked to do so by the companies.

When you discuss a marketing strategy in China with a Scottish company, for example, you will sit down with that company but you will not necessarily find yourselves dealing with the other people who offer it advice on different aspects of that business.

No, unfortunately not. It would probably be highly beneficial if we did that, because it makes sense, given that we are talking about a whole package. In addition, of course, we would never want to go in the wrong direction, which could happen.

The service that you offer to clients that you have described is quite holistic; as you say, it is not a question of providing one-off translations. You have described what your own company does. Is what you do the best in class or does it represent a typical offering from similar companies in the market?

The needs are perceived to be different, although that does not mean that they are different. One of the biggest misconceptions in Scotland is that English is the international language of business and, as a result, we do not need any other languages. That works up to a point—for example, it will work for main meetings—but the fact is that relationships are built in the side meetings, during lunch and over a pint of beer. Awareness of the culture and language helps. Of course, there should also be the back-up of the written translation.

Another misconception is that all these problems can be solved simply by throwing some language training at a company. The process of learning a language is very long and, unfortunately, unless you are a whizz-kid you will not be able to do it just like that. As a result, translation should not be an alternative but should be run alongside everything else.

And should there be?

If funding was available, we could go to companies, talk to them and give them examples or case studies to which they could relate, and that could help. I genuinely believe that what we do would benefit companies—this is not just me trying to sell what we offer. If we happen to meet a representative of a company, they might work in a different field or a different part of the company, so they might not perceive our service to be important. We have also come up against engineering companies that seem to think that, as there is only such-and-such a budget for training and they do not go beyond that, it is more important to train a forklift driver than a manager who is going off to a conference or trade fair. There could be a combination of a database that is known about, and someone in the business circulating through the business community, especially among the smaller companies, which perceive a need but are put off by lack of funding. Funding to kick-start that might help.

You mentioned the perception that English is the main business language. I suggest that, within Scotland and the UK, there has probably been an arrogance with regard to learning foreign languages because the perception has been that everyone learns English anyway, so we do not have to bother learning foreign languages. How do you overcome that perception in promoting your industry? How do you get the message through to businesses that they need to have people with foreign language skills to aid their business and their business growth and to fulfil their potential?

You commented on the fact that large companies on the continent have in-house translation services and so on, which is in contrast to what goes on here in Scotland. I probably know the answer to the question, but I will ask it nonetheless. What is the best method of dealing effectively with the needs of businesses? Is it to have an in-house department or is it to have something akin to what your business does?

Is there a market for both approaches? Really large companies would have sufficient resources to have an in-house department if they wanted one.

Have you noticed a shift in the past couple of years in the languages that you are dealing with?

I think that the dialogue is good. We are based in Musselburgh, so we deal with East Lothian Council. I was talking to the lady who is in charge of the council’s translation service only yesterday. That is a community service, which deals with the community languages, which are not, by and large, the languages that we are dealing with. However, if the council cannot meet its needs from its database, we will see whether we can help.

Those of us who have been through the business gateway service and have appreciated it are still in touch with people there.

If someone in a service is aware that it is a good idea to support a business with language services, they will suggest that to the relevant people.

No. Absolutely.

In the public sector, councils, the police and the national health service have their own banks of people on whom they can call, who are experts in relation to particular needs. Those people can help hugely, but I wonder whether they are the right people to help with the cultural issues that arise in doing business abroad. That has to be a two-way process. We have to use the knowledge of the resident Scottish business community as well as the other way round.

I am training a group of German people in one of the large insurance companies. They have wonderful German-learned English, but we are helping them with the cultural side, which they have not learned. The matter is linguistic but it is also behavioural. Those Germans have excellent English but they need to learn more about the culture here in Scotland, and that works the other way round as well. The process is working for the company because the staff operate better.

We have touched on the role of some of the public agencies, particularly Scottish Development International. One of our challenges in this inquiry is to consider whether, with the £20 million or so that it has to spend, it is optimising its influence in supporting and boosting Scottish exports. We have asked a number of witnesses this question. From your perspective, is there anything that SDI should be doing more of? Have you felt frustration, in your professional experience, about access to resources or about the approach that is taken in respect of guiding public agencies as they think about adjusting their roles to new markets and new products?

Yes. Much as I love French—it is a wonderful language and culture—the long connection between Scotland and France should not necessarily be pursued in schools. It is great that kids learn French, but Spanish, Russian and Chinese would be much more relevant for everybody. Obviously, they are not easy to learn, which is why it is important that kids learn them at an age when they find learning easy. People in school language departments tell me that there is a perception that learning a language is hard, so students do not do it. That is sad. They want a standard grade qualification, but it does not need to be French. German, which was just mentioned, is also definitely a language for European business, despite the fact that the Germans speak such good English.

That is a fair point rather than a question, but feel free to comment.

We welcome Professor Pete Downes and Carol Booth, who are our second panel of witnesses. I invite you to introduce yourselves and to make opening remarks. Then, we will have questions.

I agree with the previous witness, Dr Hiley, who said that we should consider Chinese, Russian and Spanish. Travelling internationally, I have found that we need those languages rather than French, German or English. English is the language of business, but when we get down to the more technical and workforce development aspects of training that are needed in country—particularly in vocational education and training—people do not necessarily look to use the language of business.

The key issue is cultural understanding, and language is a key component of the cultural differences that we need to be familiar with. Universities should certainly play their part in ensuring that our students understand a breadth of culture, and we do that in many ways. One is by bringing overseas students onto our campuses, and another is through exchange mechanisms to send our students abroad. We need to add that to the mix of issues in the teaching of language.

As Dr Hiley mentioned, we do not do language education too well in the UK. I am not in a position to analyse why that is the case—it may be because of the tendency for English to be an international language of business and education—but we need to change that perception. Universities need to play their part in that, but the work needs to be integrated. The comment that it starts in primary schools is important, and we need to integrate the way that we both teach language and expose children and students to overseas cultures.

I want to take up the point on how the universities and colleges work in collaboration with organisations for export and so on. Professor Downes, you say in your submission that SDI and others have been closely involved and that

“A sector-wide, national approach to international trade taken by relevant agencies has proved helpful.”

However, you go on to say that

“The most effective approach would be one which includes a client management focus.”

Can you expand on that? How could it be done in practice?

I would not want to overemphasise that point. The main thrust of the comment in our written submission is of the great and effective support that we get from SDI on the one hand and from the British Council on the other. We have raised one or two minor detailed points that relate to the diversity of interactions that we need in different markets, and we believe that in some markets the British Council has not been as effective as it might be. We do not believe that that is something that the committee can necessarily influence greatly because it is a UK-wide issue, but I suppose that that is for you to decide.

Do the colleges have anything to add on that?

We work closely with SDI’s education team. We have found it very helpful that such a team has been in place over the past couple of years. The team has been very supportive of us, both in aid-funded business and in looking for commercial opportunities for the colleges.

My role is to look for larger opportunities rather than the individual opportunities in which the colleges have previously been involved. We are much more involved now in collaborative ventures with the Scottish Qualifications Authority. We also work with the British Council abroad and with SDI. We will form consortia of colleges to address opportunities. If we think that there is an opportunity for a university or for the SQA to be involved, we will look at bringing in those partners as the opportunity develops.

However, that is still a developing picture in Scotland. We could perhaps do more to make that model more effective in the longer term. At the moment, each relationship that we broker with a college has to be done on an individual basis. We could perhaps do that better.

SDI can help us with that, but no single agency is currently charged with doing that kind of work. It would be helpful if some body was clearly given the responsibility to do that for Scotland.

My first question is for Professor Downes. In his introduction, he talked about the importance of Scotland’s reputation abroad as a provider of education in the knowledge economy. In my previous life, I was the head of the school of business in Adam Smith College in Fife, so I know how important that reputation is, especially in international work. You spoke about the need for support from Government to allow that high-quality reputation to continue. Will you expand on that?

A straightforward point from my perspective is that universities are supported by Government through the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council and it is that core support that develops our reputation on which we trade. We should not consider our commercial activity and the international trade in which we engage as independent from the fundamental purpose and role of a university, supported by Government. The one extends and develops from the other. The commercial activity absolutely depends on the strong international reputation of the university sector in Scotland.

I know that significant changes have been made and that new partners have come into the mix. How does the university sector see that support?

Yes.

Currently, for every £1 that universities in Scotland receive from Government through the funding council, they earn fractionally more than another £1 from other sources. Many of those are the overseas sources that we have talked about, whether that is overseas students or various elements of commercial interest in research activity. In the more research-intensive universities, the factor from other sources is higher. In my case in the University of Dundee, the proportion is 1:1.5 and, in one or two other universities, it might be slightly more. That is an important thing to consider.

If the two aspects were not intimately connected, one might argue that reducing funding to universities by 10 per cent would result in a drop in total funding of less than 5 per cent. However, the reality is that, if that core funding was taken out, we would lose both sources of income, because the core funding leads to the other funding. Does that make sense?

Knowledge and education are important to our economy vis-à-vis international trade. The committee will make some recommendations to Government, so it would be helpful to know what your key priority is in that regard. What would be the one change that could be made in order to help you access markets more easily?

As you rightly pointed out, we are reasonably satisfied with the relationships that we have and the level of understanding that exists about higher education provision in relation to overseas students. I am sure that Carol Booth’s comments about resources are correct, given that we are trying to access more markets and ensure that the market share does not fall but is enhanced.

Yes.

You need to put my remarks in the context of my work. I do not necessarily work at the European level. The colleges generally do that very well, and I do not tend to get involved in it. I am much more interested in the international markets. The three languages that I suggested are important.

I would certainly look at the Commonwealth of Independent States countries—for example, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and, potentially, Russia as well. All those countries have huge opportunities in the longer term. There are still many issues with them—they can be quite difficult politically and are very bureaucratic—but I have done a lot of work in Kazakhstan, so I understand the area quite well. It has a long way to go, but I think that there is a long-term opportunity there.

Portuguese is also important, particularly if we are talking about the oil and gas industry. For example, Brazil has huge opportunities, and we really need Portuguese for Brazil.

I would not like to comment specifically. I could get some feedback on that from my colleagues and inform you of that subsequently, but I do not have enough personal knowledge to be able to comment.

I agree completely that, in the British Council at UK level, there is still a lack of knowledge about how the system operates in Scotland, such as the differences between our college sector and the further education sector in England. At the moment, the colleges do not articulate that as well as they could, but we are trying to work with them to remedy that.

One specific example of how things can go wrong as a result of the lack of understanding is visa provision for overseas students coming to Scotland. As provision began to be tightened up for all the obvious and appropriate reasons, the failure to recognise that there was a four-year undergraduate degree in Scotland created enormous difficulties for Scottish universities because a three-year visa was provided.

As Carol Booth says, the tendency is that, unless we are constantly in dialogue with them, British Council staff go back to their day jobs and, because the English system is most of what they experience, they forget the Scottish system. It is not culturally embedded in the way that they think about supporting us. That is a generic point that spills out in many different, almost unpredictable ways.

There are areas of education in which Scotland has particular strengths and niches that we can market abroad. I can think of some examples in my constituency. For example, Elmwood College is pre-eminent in golf education and has strong links in China as a result. In Dundee, there are the life sciences and games industries. Are we sufficiently able to identify potential markets for those niches? For example, in Taiwan, there is a crying need for more support and links on life sciences. Is Universities Scotland aware of those issues and, if so, what is it doing to exploit them?

Universities Scotland would not particularly be aware of that; the nexus for that would be the universities themselves and their relationship with agencies such as SDI and the British Council.

The issue is complex. Although we have a good understanding of the markets and a good relationship with the agencies that help us to access them, the situation is, as I said right at the start, very dynamic and we need to be constantly on the move with regard to the markets that we access already, the new markets that we need to be engaging with and the new types of provision that relate to them. We have to inject that sense of dynamism into the universities sector and make it clear that we expect and require support from those agencies. When I talked about scouting, I meant not only in the geographical sense; we should also be horizon scanning to see how those markets might change and ensure that we keep moving forward instead of working hard simply to keep up.

The college sector has taken a slightly different approach. Initially, we looked a lot at geographical markets, but recently we have started to take a more sectoral approach with, for example, our alliance for locating leads in international education for Scotland—or ALLIES—project, which focuses on sectors such as oil and gas, life sciences, the creative industries and hospitality and tourism. We have been working with the SDI education team to identify international commercial opportunities for those sectors. The approach has been quite successful and we will probably continue with it.

As I said before, our team is small and there is a limit to the amount that we can do with regard to markets. India and China, for example, are huge markets and numerous projects could be undertaken there over the next few years.

That brings us back to the generic point about UK-wide agencies. I doubt whether there is some perverse unwillingness to promote Scotland, but there is a relative ignorance of the differences between Scotland and England in a number of different situations. That is probably more important as far as education is concerned; there are probably fewer differences to consider in the research elements that I referred to in my opening remarks, in which the critical issue is reputation. It could be argued that Scotland punches somewhat above its weight in that respect, and we should continue to trade on that.

In my long and on the whole fruitful collaboration with the British Council, I have found that, by the time you get to know people there, they have retired. They seem to go in their mid-50s, whereas, although I am over 65, I am still around and still active. There should be some system of putting those people on a reserve list, say, to be pulled in as advisers. They have lots of information on foreign co-operation, but at a time when they can be really valuable they are off spoiling grandchildren or playing golf.

I think that that is more of a comment.

Could we make more use of—I was going to say “exploit”, but that is probably not the right term—the pool of overseas graduates in Scottish universities, who could work with companies in Scotland on some of the cultural issues that the previous panel highlighted? Also, could they help to expand the globalscot network and be used a bit more effectively to identify opportunities and support Scottish companies abroad?