Each month we shine a spotlight on a member of the Free Spirits community.
Leigh Lovering brings more than 40 years of commercial, leadership and people development experience to her role as Managing Director at Accentua Group Ltd. She’s passionate about keeping the human element at the heart of language services, helping clients navigate everything from translation and localisation to voiceover and turnkey language solutions. And if you’ve got a language-related question, she’s always happy to have her brains picked!
You’ve stepped into a lift and someone asks what you do. You’ve got five floors before the doors open, what do you say?
I help businesses speak the language of their customers—literally. At Accentua, we help organisations translate, localise and adapt their content so it works around the world. If you’ve ever seen a training course, website, or advert that feels like it was created specifically for your country, there’s a good chance a company like ours was involved.
We make sure things don’t get lost in translation, keeping the integrity of content and words, because nobody wants their carefully crafted message accidentally turning into ‘Please do not feed the husband’ instead of ‘Please do not feed the animals!’ 😄
What challenge do your clients most often bring to you, and how do you help sort it out?
Most clients come to us because they’ve got content that works well in one market but they’re struggling to make it work internationally.
They’re often juggling multiple languages, tight deadlines, and concerns around quality or consistency.
We help by taking the complexity away—creating a localisation process that makes it easier for them to scale their content globally while keeping it accurate, engaging, on time, on budget and on brand. Or they don’t have experience, skills and resources in house, so we step in as a virtual team to complement their solution.
What are you currently building, experimenting with, or hoping to do more of this year?
This year I’m focused on growing Accentua and showing organisations that successful multilingual communication doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. I’m particularly interested in how AI can help businesses create, adapt and deliver content globally while still keeping the human touch where it matters most and ensuring that the solutions available are flexible and adaptable to harness the best of both skills. Education is key when clients are adapting to new technologies, If you “ don’t know what you don’t know” how can you choose the best options for your project.
If you haven’t guessed already, I’m passionate about the impact of language in business. Success of projects, business goals and speed to market are all silently impacted by language – positively when well executed vs silently negatively damaging when not.
