Elli-Noora Nieminen is an entrepreneur and jack of all trades linguistic. She does multilingual communication, content creation, marketing, and translation. Her education and work experience have taught her to be open-minded and bold.
Key lessons a degree in literature offers
After graduating from high school in Finland, Elli-Noora decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree in contemporary literature at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in France. "My bachelor's degree in contemporary literature included a lot of reading and writing assignments. This prepared me to handle large amounts of information and sharpened my ability to summarize long texts" Elli-Noora reflects.
Grades were based on students' own interpretations of literary work and how they were able to present them in front of the class.
"Presenting my own analysis of French novels in front of native speakers taught me argumentation skills and how to handle my nerves" Elli-Noora explains.
Nowadays, these skills come in handy when it comes to securing new clients. Elli-Noora knows how to sell her expertise and justify the need for her services. One of her key selling points is her ability to create user-friendly texts that take different target groups into account. She points out that this is something that machines can't do. "Machines can't localize a text as well as a humans can" she states.
The importance of building and maintaining relationships as an entrepreneur
In a way her studies in France taught Elli-Noora how to fail. Elli-Noora was a straight A's kind of student back in high school in Finland. Now she had to accept that she was still smart and capable even if she wasn't top of my class. However, the atmosphere was not competitive and having the support of her peers made a big difference. Building and actively taking care of a support system is important for entrepreneurs.
"This includes giving back to friends and remembering to thank allies along the way. I tend to think that even if you do succeed alone, who are you going to celebrate it with?" Elli-Noora explains.
What it takes to be an entrepreneur
Overseeing her own work suits Elli-Noora as she values liberty over stability. "However, not a single job is stable in the end" Elli-Noora says, which shows that self-employment is not risky as it might seem.
"Of course, as an entrepreneur, you have to account for a lot of things, and you are always evaluating whether you have enough clients" Elli-Noora explains.
She likes the liberty entrepreneurship gives her to choose the projects that she takes up. Elli-Noora is a strong believer of staying true to your values. She knows that a lot of people become stressed, not from a large workload but from doing work that is against your own values.
A passion for quality copy
After graduating with a Bachelor of Comparative Literature, Elli-Noora returned to Finland to do a master’s degree in Multilingual Communication and Translation at the University of Tampere. A highlight of her studies there included an internship at the European Parliament in Luxembourg as a translator. She translated from French to Finnish and English to Finnish. In her master's thesis Elli-Noora evaluated the usability of the IATE (Interactive Terminology for Europe) terminology database. Paying attention to the usability and readability of text is a cornerstone of Elli-Noora's work to this day.
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