There are several institutions that offer linguistic consultation services in Lithuania. Who needs another one, right? Actually, we believe that linguistic institutions work with the standard language, a norm, having little to do with “real-time” hands-on applications of language pertinent to different fields, and are not always in a position to cater to the real needs of business when it comes to subject-specific language. They cannot offer any degree of flexibility; they work by rigid rules, provide no interpretations nor analyse how one word or another could be perceived within a specific segment of business. That is like running all-out in front of a speeding train of language, trying to suggest that it changes its direction, or chasing that very train, trying to give its direction a name. Whereas we have 20 years of experience working with a realistic, here-and-now, actual and living language, and consider ourselves linguistic practitioners.
Going through documents from all of the key segments of business – thousands of legal, medical, technical, marketing, publicist texts – we feel like we’re holding a finger on the living pulse of the language as we watch daily which of the new things that the linguists suggest the language takes on, which of them it tries to accept only to eventually dismiss them as a foreign body, observing how the language evolves in time, how Slavic constructions are being replaced by their English counterparts, bookish constructions by those originating from the social networks, seeing the prevalent mistakes in every subject-specific area, and are able to predict future trends.
We know if a specific term will succeed even before it is officially approved, we closely observe terminological processes when a word becomes a concept and, eventually, a term. We have databases that work as a corpus, we are in a position to measure the stylistic conformity between different words and constructions and the language of a text. It is for this reason that we are constantly being approached by businesses that want to launch a new product requesting us to adapt its slogan to the linguistic and cultural environment, managers of different companies asking us to make sure that they will be able to introduce themselves by telling the right job title to their foreign partners, legal advisers helping their clients tackle cases related to intellectual property of words, and many others.