Meet your Community Manager: Ben
If I could describe Ben in two words, I’d probably say “insanely sociable”. I’ve said that to him and he had no option but to agree with me. He loves being around people from different cultures, nationalities and ethnicities. Being a people person is so ingrained in his personality that it seems this adjective was created for him. So, there’s nothing more natural for Ben than to manage the biggest community we have at Unbabel, the German one. He’s also responsible for Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian, Bulgarian and Hindi.
“Being a people person is so ingrained in his personality that it seems this adjective was created for him”
In March 2018, Ben moved from his hometown of Bristol to Lisbon. After a year working in customer service and translation management, he joined Unbabel in April 2019. He is so used to the city that he probably now knows it better than any local. What he enjoys the most in Portugal is that even in the winter, you can still feel the sun on your skin for a lot of hours in the day. When I asked what he likes the least, I got a very British answer: “Portuguese beer. I don’t accept the fact there are only two beers in a country like that”, he laughs.
Beer is an important thing for Brits and that’s probably why one of his favorite things to do is to go to a pub and spend time with his friends. Ben’s idea of a perfect holiday would be staying in a city with a moderate level of activity. “I’d go to an art gallery in the mid-morning, have a really nice and long lunch, drink some wine, walk in a park and read something”. He also loves being out in nature and walks in a forest. When Ben is still working but has some time to spare, he’d be learning Danish and working on his writing.
Although Ben is British by birth, we all agree he is German by heart. For those of you who don’t know, he is fluent in this language. “I started learning German from quite a young age because my mum is a German speaker and used to read stories in this language to me.” One particular story he remembers from his childhood years is “Miffy im Zoo”, originally written in Dutch but big in Germany too. Apart from German, Ben is also fluent in European Portuguese. He didn’t speak a word of it until he was 18, but when he started his BA in Modern Languages at the University of Bristol, he had to choose another language to study.
“Although Ben is British by birth, we all agree he is German by heart”
Ben has been interested in languages for as long as he can remember, all of which was fostered by his parents. “My mum used to travel a lot and when she was traveling, I used to ask questions such as ‘.what language do they speak over there?’ or things like that”, he says. For Ben, it’s not about learning a few words in the local language just because you’re travelling to a certain destination. It’s about enjoying and having an identification with a certain culture, like he has with German. Multilingualism is a known word for him because he also speaks a little bit of French, Czech and Danish.
As mentioned in the first article of this series, each Community Manager has a different focus within the Community team. Since Ben is so talented with languages, he is the first person we go to when we need to assess quality and linguistic issues at Unbabel. Besides that, he’s constantly writing articles for the blog and working on our incredible Knowledge base. He’s the only English native speaker in our team, so he’s constantly proofreading everything we send to our editors.
His communities and our team already know how gifted he is at his job. Personally, I’d say that although he’s only 25, he’s an old soul. Not only for his wisdom with languages but for his emotional intelligence to deal with difficult situations. In 2020, he definitely had to use his soul to make the most out of it, and he did: “I’ve had a strange but in some ways an amazing year. I met amazing people, but also spent a lot of time with my dogs at home. I’ve learned a lot of things about myself. It has been a huge learning curve for me”. For the next year? Ben is optimistic and if he could give one piece of advice to us, it’d be to “take something around you that brings you joy and hold on to it. Find something that makes you happy”.
“Take something around you that brings you joy and hold on to it. Find something that makes you happy”
Ben is also very optimistic about what is coming next to our editors. I asked him about some of the interesting things he has been working on to our communities and the answer was very encouraging: “There’s a huge change coming in the way we review language guidelines and resources to editors. For the first time, we’ll have a lot of resources to improve quality. We are becoming much more transparent and we plan to keep doing that”. For now, there’s not much more he can say, but stay tuned for the amazing things Ben is preparing to our community.
To conclude, I asked Ben to recommend a book, a film, and a song — and what he’d like to say to our community if he could say only one thing.
Book: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“This book recounts an event of a murder. It’s thrilling and it grips you. It’s also funny and very clever.”
Song: Got To Be Real by Cheryl Lynn
“I tend to listen to songs over and over again so there’s some that I absolutely adore. I love disco, but for me this song transcends that and every time I hear it I’m flooded with happy memories. It’s five minutes of perfection — amazing vocals, a fantastic key change, and if I’m going to dance round my kitchen, this is the song I’d pick every time.”
Film: Good Bye Lenin!
“It’s a German film from the 2000s. It’s very famous in Germany but it’s beautifully tender and sweet and deeply funny. It gave me a real joy to realise I was getting out there as a German speaker. For me, watching it when I was starting to get fluent was wonderful.”
If you could say one thing to everyone in our community, what would it be?
“We love you. It seems super cliché for me to say that if you’re emailing us and talking about bugs, but we really love our editors and they don’t see how much we fight for them behind the scenes. We’re always trying to make their life better.”
