Lifeline celebrates 25 years with global cake bake

Preston-based Lifeline Language Services has celebrated its 25th year in business by sharing a cake with its linguists based across the globe.

Established in late 1989, Lifeline provides a full range of language services including translation, interpretation, voiceover, multilingual typesetting and subtitling to clients internationally. With 11 staff at offices in Preston city centre, the company maintains a team of approximately 3,500 freelance linguists worldwide covering over 150 languages.

In celebration of the company’s birthday, recipes for the Lifeline Birthday Cake were sent to Lifeline’s key linguists in territories throughout the world as far and wide as China, Germany, Ukraine, Italy, Netherlands and Egypt.

The recipe and instructions were interpreted and double checked and linguists were asked to bake a cake to the recipe and to send in their pictures of the global cake cutting on the company’s birthday.

Lifeline director Lynn Everson said: “After 25 years in business working with partners across the world, we thought it would be fun to go global with our birthday celebrations. Avoiding the extra carbon impact of sending cakes to all our suppliers, we thought it would add some extra fun by tying in to what we do – accurate translation. With a recipe for Victoria sponge kindly supplied by Too Nice to Slice of Lytham St Annes, we emailed instructions for the cake to our key suppliers. Translating the instructions they baked the same cake, proving that with good translation, a cake baked on one side of the world will be exactly the same as one baked on the other.”