Author: Barbara Dragsted

How to give a good presentation to an international audience? Here you can get concrete advice for better presentations. You can also sign up for one of our presentation skills courses. Have you ever given a presentation where you were unsure whether the audience found the topic interesting? Whether they got the main points? Where the discussion didn't really get going when you finished your presentation? Where it fell flat when you tried to say something funny? Or where you felt limited because your presentation had to be in English? Then you're not alone! And luckily, there are some concrete things you can do to improve your presentation skills. Below, we've put together 7 tips for better presentations.

7 tips for better presentations 

1. Make personal contact with your audience before you start
2. Start by being yourself
3. Then be your professional self
4. Take yourself and your audience seriously and avoid irony and jokes
5. Start your presentation with your main message
6. End the presentation with your main message
7. Let the final slide open the dialogue 

1. Make personal contact with your audience before you start

A presentation is a social event. It is an interaction between you and your audience. Therefore, it is important that you show interest in your audience by linking your topic to something they know from their own lives. Talk to your audience before you go on, during the breaks, or when the presentation is over. Ask who they are and what interests them. 

2. Start by being yourself 

Start your presentation by telling a short story or sharing a personal experience that is relevant to the topic you are going to talk about. This creates a relaxed and personal atmosphere, while maintaining your authority and having a professional conversation with your audience.

3. Then be your professional self

After you have made a personal connection with your audience at the beginning of your presentation, you can turn up the formality: Raise your voice and use body language and gestures in a way that exudes professionalism and engagement. This will make your audience listen to you.

4. Take yourself and your audience seriously and avoid irony and jokes

As Danes, we often tend to be very informal, even in professional contexts. But you have to be careful with that. Jokes and irony can work well in a Danish context, but when you are facing an international and multicultural audience, the informal style can do more harm than good. So if in doubt, the best advice is to keep the formal tone when giving a presentation.

5. Start your presentation with your main message

Start by presenting your main message or points. What specifically do you want to tell your audience? Be focused and professional and formulate clearly and precisely.

6. End the presentation with your main message

Round off your presentation by repeating your main message and relating it to what you have presented. Again, be focused and professional, and articulate clearly and concisely.

7. Let the final slide open up a dialogue 

Make sure your closing slide inspires a conversation with the audience. Instead of writing 'Thank you for today' or 'Questions', use the final slide to summarise and underline your main points and let them be the starting point for questions and discussion. 

Do you want to strengthen your presentation skills in English with the help of a course? Then read more about our presentation skills in English course here.

Perhaps you already have experience with using professional translators? Maybe it's the first time you've had to have a text translated by an ageny? Either way, you may have considered whether to use a professional translation agency or contact a freelancer. And what the difference really is.

What are the benefits of using a freelancer?

One advantage of working with a freelance translator can be that the cost of a translation can be lower because the freelancer is usually 'only' required to earn their own salary - unlike a translation agency, which has to cover a range of other overheads. However, the price of a translation depends on many different factors and can also vary greatly from one freelancer to another, so it's hard to say anything very specific about the cost of a translation - whether you use a freelancer or a translation agency.

Another advantage can be that you, as a client, build up a relationship with one particular translator who gets to know your company and your texts well - unlike some types of translation agencies that use many different freelancers and where, in principle, you risk having a new person assigned to the task every time you send a text for translation. 

What are the benefits of using a translation agency?

The advantage of working with a professional translation agency is that you, the client, can experience greater flexibility. This is because the translation agency has several employees or subcontractors who can take on a given task at a given time. This means that when you work with a translation agency, it is more likely that there will be the resources to complete your assignment by the deadline you want.

Another advantage is that a translation agency can call on different translators with different specialisations and skills. If you need a legal contract translated one week, a technical description of a product the next, and a text for your website the following week, the translation agency can assign different translators with different strengths and specialisations to different tasks.

However, it is often an advantage to have the same translator, or a few translators, always working on your texts. Clients should be aware that some translation agencies work with many different freelance translators, and that there is a risk that a new translator will be appointed each time something needs translating. 

At GlobalDenmark Translations we have a permanent staff of in-house translators with different specialisations, and as a client you will always have contact with the same translator who has special knowledge of your field and the types of text you need translated. 

We specialise in Danish to English and English to Danish translation, but we work with other translation agencies and freelance translators, so if our clients need translation into or from other languages, we can help with that too.

How much does a translation cost at a professional translation agency?

The price of a translation from a professional translation agency varies greatly and can depend on, for example, how quickly you need the translation, how extensive the task is, etc, 

The translation market is a 'mixed' one, and a good rule of thumb is to be wary of very cheap translations. You may receive a translation that has not been proofread and quality checked, the translator may not have the relevant training, and you may not have the opportunity to speak directly to the translator about any questions or requests for adjustments to the translation.

Read more here about how we work with translation at GlobalDenmark, a well-established professional translation agency in Copenhagen, and click here if you would like a quote for a translation.

The four roles of the translator and how to work well with your translator

The invisible translator...

It has always been a mantra in translation - both in practice and as an academic discipline - that a successful translation is one that does not sound translated. The reader of the translated text must not be struck by awkward phrasing and word choice or otherwise sense the original language behind the words in the translated text. You may be familiar with the irritation - or pleasure - of guessing what has been said in English when reading an English text.

The paradox of the translator's role is that the better you do your job, the less you get noticed. In a way, you could say that a translator's most important task is to be invisible.

It may sound like a thankless task, but there is great satisfaction and professional pride in (re)creating a text that seems as valid and credible to the target language reader as the original text does to the source language reader. This is true of fiction, where the translator's task is, somewhat simplistically, to give the reader of a translated novel or short story the same experience as the original language reader.

And this is true of specialist texts, where the translator's task is to hit on the specialist terminology and jargon that seems natural and recognisable in the target language within a specialist community. If the translator fails to do this, the technical text loses its credibility and therefore its value.

Most professional translators specialise in translating technical language, and their main focus is to create texts that are written in natural language, using the correct technical terminology - in other words, texts that don't "stand out". In this way, the professional translator takes pride in being "invisible".

... and the visible contribution

However, when it comes to the translation process, a skilled translator with a good overview can take on a much more visible and constructive role than "just" delivering a linguistically correct text with the right terminology. 

1) the translator as a sparring partner

A successful translation requires that the translator understands the text he or she is working with - if not down to the last detail, then at least enough to be able to see through errors and ambiguities, or lack of coherence. The skilled translator will draw the client's attention to such ambiguities in the original text, and in this way the translation process will lead to a better original text.

2) the translator as co-producer

A translator who has built up a special competence in a particular subject area becomes a kind of 'semi-expert' in the field, and this can benefit the client in many contexts. For example, the translator can help proofread texts that the client has written himself, for example in English. In addition to making linguistic corrections, the translator can provide input on rewrites and improvements to make the message clearer.

3) the translator as cultural mediator

The translator has an in-depth knowledge of the culture in which the translation will be used, and in some cases it may be necessary to make extensive adaptations to a text in order to reach the target audience in a particular culture.

4) the translator as terminological expert

An important element of technical language translation is finding the correct technical terminology, and translators spend a lot of time searching for terminology. The terminology is stored in a database and this database can be made available to the client as a kind of dictionary. In this way, the translator helps to ensure consistency of language and terminology for the client, in both the source and target languages (e.g. Danish and English).

Read more about the benefits of a translation agency.

Danes are good at English. A few years ago, we were world champions according to the EF English Proficiency Index, which ranks the English proficiency of 100 countries every year, and right now we are in third place behind the Netherlands and Austria.

We can be proud of this ranking, and we Danes are right to pride ourselves on our English language skills. But we can also shoot at each other if we think the others are not so sharp. 'That sounds a bit Danglish' we say when someone uses an expression that seems to be directly translated from Danish.

It shows that many have an impressively good sense of good, natural English - and that they are sensitive to what might be called 'Danish contagion'. But perhaps we are sometimes almost over-sensitive, and judge phrases and expressions out of hand, even though they are actually, well, perfectly alright.

At GlobalDenmark, we help our clients make English flow - either by editing texts that the client has written in English, or by translating Danish texts from scratch. Sometimes we find that a client asks: 'Can you really say that in English? It's directly translated from Danish'. And when we explain that yes, you do use exactly the same expression or metaphor in English, it can come as a surprise. A few examples:

We're confident that the new project will act as a springboard for more contracts. Yes, 'springboard' can be translated with 'springboard'. Check any English dictionary online and you'll find that the explanation is the same as in English - something that helps to set an activity in motion (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

With her outstanding research background, she was a great sparring partner in developing my ideas. Sparring partner can be used in English as well as in Danish either as a box term or in a figurative sense to refer to a person with whom one has serious but friendly discussions, explains the Cambridge Dictionary.

Work on the project is in full swing. Perhaps a hair-raising phrase for some Danes, but it is as correct in English as it is in Danish, and the meaning is the same, namely that something is at a high level of activity (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).

The three examples are what can be called 'idiomatic' expressions, i.e. phrases that use an image to express a certain meaning. And the list of such coinciding expressions in English and Danish is longer than you might think. That's because we've borrowed and exchanged expressions with each other for hundreds of years - and still do. But it's probably also because the linguistic images stem from something cultural, and Danish and English cultures are no further apart than many of the images are the same.

For example, both languages use the term 'hot potato', but this is probably not the case in Chinese, where potatoes are a rarer item on the menu. 'Springboard' and 'sparring partner' in the examples above use images from the world of sport, and here it is assumed that there is a common cultural starting point, with gymnastics and boxing being well-known sports disciplines.

To sum up: sometimes you shouldn't make things more difficult for yourself than necessary when translating, but simply use the term that comes to mind. The problem, of course, is that this is far from always a sure-fire strategy. If it were, translation would be no art at all. The challenge with fixed expressions and metaphors is that they often differ from language to language. And if you translate an expression directly from Danish into English that doesn't exist, you can get it horribly wrong. Just think of Bertel Haarder, who told his ministerial colleagues in the EU that "Normally I say, early to bed and up with the cock". Or former culture minister Jytte Hilden, who put "The prick over the i". Not to mention former national coach Ricard Møller Nielsen, who delivered several legendary quotes, for example when he explained to the press that you had to "screw down the expectations" and that he had changed tactics so that now you would "play with long balls!"

Even a seasoned speaker can get nervous - and that's okay

Peter goes on stage to talk about his experiences in the Chinese market. His audience is business people, mainly middle-aged men and women, all exuding control and confidence. Peter feels the audience's eyes following him on his way up to the podium, a hike of about 8 metres. Without being very nervous, Peter can feel his pulse rising a little - he's given many talks before, but can still enjoy the little rush of standing in front of an audience. In fact, he knows from experience that a little nervousness is good for him, because it makes him a little sharper. And he'll need that today, because this is a demanding audience: they want to be stimulated, inspired and informed.

Good contact with the audience strengthens self-confidence and interaction with the audience

Peter's gaze catches a member of the audience he was talking to before the doors to the auditorium opened. They nod briefly at each other. Peter takes a deep breath and feels his body straighten. The room falls silent. Peter smiles, another listener smiles back. Peter delivers his lecture. Instinctively he keeps an eye on his listeners. Is anyone bored? He sees one nod thoughtfully, another smile attentively - yes, it's going very well, Peter thinks.

Notice how much is going on between Peter and his listeners. Eye contact, nods, smiles, seriousness - all communication that has nothing to do with the content of the talk, but is crucial to what the audience gets out of it.

Leave the main points on the last slide

Peter ends his talk with his five main points, followed by five simple bullets on the PowerPoint - they stay on the wall as he finishes. After his brief, slightly insistent summary, he pauses for a moment to do some art, after which he says thank you. Peter receives raucous applause. And the slide with the five pointers is still on the wall when he thanks the applause and invites questions. The audience looks up at the slide and there are some good, interesting questions and comments. It was a good talk.

Connect with the audience even before the talk starts

Peter is aware that he is "on" already at the reception, where participants drink coffee before the lecture starts. Here he had a brief chat with several of the waiting listeners. When he caught their eye during the talk, they nodded back.

In this way, Peter had already made a good connection with some of the audience before the talk itself, and this helped to boost both his confidence and the interaction with the audience when he went on.

To sum up: a lecture can be excellent in terms of content, but if there is no attention to communication and contact between the speaker and the audience, good and important points can be lost. Peter benefited from the subtle communication that happens between the speaker and the audience. It helped to make the talk a good experience for the audience and himself.

Do you also want to strengthen your presentation skills? Read more about our presentation skills courses here.