She Turned Her Love of Foreign Languages into a Business — and Says of AI: “It Can Translate Everything, but People Still Have to Speak”

Artificial intelligence can write an email, translate a document and help us understand a foreign language. But when it comes to holding a meeting, negotiating or making a professional impression, language skills still have no substitute. That is precisely why Sanda Lisičin believes AI has not made language learning unnecessary — it has simply changed what we expect from our language skills.

Fifteen years ago, Lisičin founded Moje znanje, a language centre specialising in business and legal English. Over time, she expanded the business to include translation and conference interpreting. Today, she works with judges, prosecutors, government institutions, companies and international organisations, supported by a team of seven colleagues.

There was no grand business plan behind it all, however. It took one crisis, one classroom in her apartment and the realisation that she actually loved a job she had never planned to do.

From Financial Crisis to Becoming an Entrepreneur

Before starting her own business, Lisičin worked at another language school, where she began teaching business English. Although she had never imagined herself in that role, she quickly became interested in it.

“I never thought I would work as a teacher, but then I realised how much I enjoyed it,” Lisičin recalls.

Then the financial crisis hit, bringing drastic cuts to employees’ salaries. Rather than looking for another job, she decided to try working for herself. That is how her current centre came into being in 2011.

“I started on my own, which is why I called it ‘Moje znanje’ [My Knowledge],” she says.

The beginning was quite literally at home.

“I started with one classroom, literally in my apartment,” she recalls.

But the business grew as new students and associates joined. Soon, one classroom became two, and then she needed to find a larger space. What had started as a solo entrepreneurial venture gradually developed into a team. Today, Moje znanje has seven team members, some of whom have been working with Lisičin for around a decade.

Finding a Niche

As the business grew, its specialisation became increasingly clear. Lisičin was particularly keen to focus on legal English, an area that appealed to her precisely because it requires constant learning.

She told us that both of her parents were lawyers and wanted her to follow in their footsteps. In the end, she did find her way into the legal field — but in a very different role.

Unlike general language proficiency, legal English requires an understanding of specific terminology, legal systems and professional context. And the deeper the knowledge, the more specialised the field becomes.

“It’s a never-ending niche; you simply can’t learn it all,” Lisičin says.

Alongside language training, Moje znanje gradually developed translation services as well. In recent years, Lisičin has focused increasingly on conference interpreting, including work for European institutions. She has also worked at Eurojust, an experience she particularly highlights, alongside her work for the European Parliament and the European Commission.

“We’re going deeper and deeper into it,” she says of the specialisation that has taken her from teaching business English to working with lawyers and international institutions.

The Pandemic as a Catalyst for Change

When the pandemic arrived in 2020, educational institutions suddenly faced a major challenge. Many were forced to close their doors. Moje znanje, too, had to change the way it operated almost overnight.

At first, even Lisičin was not convinced that online teaching would work.

“At first, I was also in shock and thought, ‘I’m not going to do this online — it’s just not my thing,’” she admits.

However, the centre already had long-term contracts with major companies, so clients did not simply walk away. Instead, they had to find a way to continue providing the training.

“We tried to patch up the contracts, and we didn’t lose our clients because of Covid,” Lisičin says.

After a few weeks, everyone had adapted to the new online format.

What initially looked like a threat to the business ultimately opened up an entirely new way of working. Students and teachers no longer had to travel to classes, look for parking or coordinate their schedules around getting to a classroom, while all the materials became accessible in one place.

The biggest fear — that online teaching would not be sufficiently effective — did not materialise.

“Everyone says there is no difference in terms of learning outcomes,” Lisičin explains.

The online model remained even after the pandemic. Physical spaces are still needed for some larger seminars, but most classes can now be delivered remotely.

This has also made international groups possible, meaning that legal professionals from different European countries can participate in the same training sessions.

“We might have someone from Italy, someone from Lithuania and someone from Croatia, all attending the same class. I think that’s fantastic,” Lisičin says.

Knowledge Is Difficult to Sell

The pandemic therefore became more of a transformation than a catastrophe. But for an entrepreneur selling an intellectual service, there is a challenge that predates the pandemic by many years: how do you show a client the value of something they cannot physically see?

“It’s much easier to sell a haircut or a manicure because you can see the result, whereas an intellectual service is much harder to spot immediately,” Lisičin says.

That is why she believes training needs to be as practical as possible. It is not enough for a student to know a rule or understand a text. They need to know how to use the language in the situations they will actually encounter at work.

This is particularly important when it comes to business communication. Someone may be able to use technology to produce a perfect email, but that does not mean they will be equally capable of participating in a meeting, negotiating or giving a presentation.

What Is Left for Humans?

This is precisely where people’s relationship with language learning is changing. Lisičin says she has noticed a sharp increase in people’s reliance on artificial intelligence over the past six months.

One of her students even described it as a kind of relief.

“I’ve handed everything over to ChatGPT, my brain has become lazy, so let’s finally start communicating orally,” she recalls him saying.

She sees the key issue in the difference between written and spoken language. AI can help make a text flawless, but it cannot give a person the confidence they need for a real conversation.

“I think an even bigger gap is going to emerge in spoken communication,” Lisičin believes.

In the future, this could lead to an unusual situation: people will use AI to write increasingly polished texts while their ability to speak spontaneously in a foreign language falls behind.

“On the one hand, everything will sound great — beautifully written emails and documents — but then, when they actually have to communicate, it will all fall apart” Lisičin says.

It’s Not Enough to Simply Get the Message Across

For that reason, she believes language education needs to focus increasingly on what technology cannot do for us — real communication.

In a business environment, it is not enough to know what a sentence means. What matters is how it sounds, whether it is appropriate for a particular relationship and situation, and whether it conveys a professional impression.

“It’s no longer just about getting the message across. It’s more like: ‘Okay, I know how to get the message across, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite right,’” she explains.

This is where she sees the future of business English. Students need to be helped to use the language actively, in situations that resemble their real working environment, rather than simply understand it.

“That’s the business aspect that actually needs to be sharpened and trained,” she says.

With legal language, the stakes are even higher. A translation error can change the meaning of a legal document, which is why people are still much less willing to rely on AI in this area.

Behind all this professional specialisation, however, there is something much simpler.

“I absolutely love languages — any language,” she says.

That passion is also evident in the way she approaches learning them. She does not like skipping unfamiliar words, even when she could work out their meaning from context.

In addition to English and Italian, which she studied and uses professionally, she has also learned French. At one point, Italian also took on a business dimension, while French remained an interesting linguistic side journey.

Knowledge That Stays with You

From a single classroom in her apartment to a specialised centre for business and legal English, Moje znanje did not grow through one major business move. It developed gradually — by finding a niche, building a team, adapting during the pandemic and continually deepening its expertise.

And it is precisely this specialisation that Lisičin now sees as her greatest advantage. At a time when translation is available to almost anyone with a few clicks, the value of genuine expertise becomes even more apparent.

AI can help write an email. It can translate a document. It can explain a grammar rule.

But when a person has to sit across from another person and communicate convincingly, precisely and professionally, we return to what Lisičin has been doing from the very beginning.

Knowledge that is not merely information, but a skill.

That is why, Lisičin believes, language learning is not going to disappear. The question we ask simply needs to change.

Not “Can AI translate this for me?”

but rather:

“Can I say it well enough myself?

 

This article was published by Women in Adria on 1 September 2026. You can read the original HERE.

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