A Community of Practice for Interpreting: the missing link

Time flies. Sometimes it goes so fast that there is no space to stop and reflect, and celebrate too! Well today, I want to stop and share our collective experience of the #trainingoftrainers for #Interpretingstudies at London Metropolitan University , a short course that took place during the last week of June 2023 (20 hours over 5 days). So what's new? It was the first time I ran the course in a hybrid mode 😊. - Four of us were onsite Silvia Scivales ACIL (UK based), Ebaa Alwash (UK based) and Asuman Yıldırım (Based in Turkey). I was on site too. - Seven colleagues were online @RoksolanaPovoroznyuk and Oleksandra Litvinyak (Based in Ukraine), Irina Sanders (UK based), María Luz Salas Roca (Based in Peru), Lucienne Peace (UK/Malta based), Emma Jane Brown (based in Spain) and Ondrej Klabal (based in the Czech Republic). The first question I have asked myself is: is the hybrid experience better for participants compared to the online experience? It certainly offers an inc...

Every cohort of students differs from one year to the next...one could get used to it. However, call me naive, I never cease to be taken by surprise. This year is not different. Let me explain... Designing a lesson or a course goes far beyond what makes good content and how to best convey knowledge and key concepts. It is all about designing an experience that keeps you motivated, learning and asking for more.  However, there are different categories of lessons.  First, there are lessons you enjoy teaching. You have tried them before, you have refined and fine tuned the outcome; like with play dough, you can mould your lesson to individual students' needs, the uniqueness of a  group, and their likes and dislikes.  Then, there are lessons when you know that you need to dig further into ideas, knowledge and innovative strategies to make your lesson work.  Your inquisitive mind is then fully switched on (Origin:www.redbubble.com) Finally, and th...

T ime has come to let go of secrets. Mine is simple: every year, at the same period, I feel stressed out and lost. Make no mistake, it always coincides with teaching a new cohort of interpreting students... More than 40 postgraduate interpreting students have entrusted me to bring them through a personal and professional journey  of learning and discovery. They have paid money and made sacrifices with the hope that their interpreting career can take off and allow them to earn a living, gain satisfaction and make progression. Every year, the same symptoms creep in about one week before the teaching starts; I feel I do not know anything. A spiral of thoughts and doubts bombard my confidence and I am reduced to a nervous wreck. I anticipate the joys, think about the students I interviewed, the work we will do together and the development of professional lives including mine. What is normally positive becomes paralysing. However hard I try, I cannot convince myself that it will...

Whilst researching Communities of Practice (CoP) as a model for interpreting studies, I increasingly realised, even though I was already aware of it, that interpreters have often been considered to be rare souls and as such quite unique . Rare  and unique  are not the first two features that come to mind when considering Community of Practice (CoP) as a possible framework for interpreting studies or indeed the interpreting profession. Rare and unique But let's take a leap back in time and explore who interpreters were in Antiquity. Interpreters were found where there was a need to solve or avoid conflicts, negotiate business or public relations or indeed, in courts where 'foreigners' were tried. As such their status varied. The Greeks considered interpreters as semi gods; they used the words ' translator'  or  'interpreter'  indifferently which meant ' a human being who performs one of this god's numerous activities (including lin...