Love AILA, Love China!

Our crowded stand at AILA

AILA 2011 was a very interesting cultural experience. The organisation was uniquely Chinese, and I think we will all remember the orange T-shirts of the ever helpful and cheerful volunteers. The highlight of the congress was a photo montage of the events of the week, set to music, played out at the closing ceremony!

AILA 2011 also saw the first awarding of the AILA-Multilingual Matters solidarity awards, which enabled two AILA delegates to travel to this year’s congress. There will be further awards at forthcoming AILA congresses, and we will soon be announcing the details of our AILA-Multilingual Matters library awards.

Discourse, Identity, and China's Internal Migration

One of the parts of the job that I love the most, is selling the books we publish directly, and talking to our authors and customers in person. In China we sell through our import partners, and so I found it a little difficult to stop myself from bartering and offering discounts in the manner that I normally do at the book exhibits. But it was great to watch our importers sell so many books, and even more encouraging to see many local Chinese delegates who I have not met before browsing and purchasing the books. And I had many interesting conversations at the stand, and was proud to be able to hand deliver a hot off the presses copy of “Discourse, Identity and China’s Internal Migration” to a happy author.

A visit to the Confucius Temple

I travelled to Beijing via my grandfather’s village in rural Finland, which believe it or not is almost directly en-route from the UK. The contrast was quite mind-boggling! I have never seen so many cars and such traffic as I have in Beijing. But the modern metro system makes the city quite easy to navigate, and everywhere I walked I found people helpful and willing to communicate even if we did not share a common language.

I can’t wait for my next chance to visit China and continue growing the friendships and working relationships that we have developed.

Tommi

Summertime at Channel View

It’s finally summertime here and we’re all trying to make the most of the rare days of sunshine! The summer can be a quiet time for academic publishers as many researchers are on holiday or making the most of the vacation and not having to teach their students. However, the Channel View team will be busy beavering away (inbetween our own holidays of course!) and getting ready for the start of the new academic year. We will be preparing our new catalogues as well as making arrangements for forthcoming conferences.

In August Tommi is attending the 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA) in Beijing. China is a really big market for us and as AILA is an important conference it is essential that we attend. While he is there Tommi will be meeting with our Chinese rep to discuss our strategy for the Chinese market. He will report back on how the conference goes later in the summer.

Meanwhile, we have three important European conferences to prepare for in September. Firstly, there’s the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) conference. This year it’s just down the road at the University of the West of England so we don’t need to travel far to get there! Next is the 21st Annual Conference of the European Second Language Association (EUROSLA) which is in Stockholm, Sweden this year. Our publishing assistant Laura will be staffing our stand at EUROSLA so do go and see her and take a look at our new books. When Tommi has recovered from his trip to China he will be heading to the Seventh International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism (L3) which this year will be in Warsaw, Poland. We sponsor the Best Student Paper Prize at the L3 conference so the winner will be awarded their choice of €100 of Multilingual Matters books. That takes us up to the end of September and after that we will be preparing for the Frankfurt Book Fair.

So that’s what we’ll be doing for the next couple of months. Also, with 4 out of 5 of the Channel View team having their birthdays in August, we generally end up eating an awful lot of birthday cake throughout the summer!