Olga Egorova, Director of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation, Participates in the DG SCIC Universities Conference

In April, Olga Egorova, Director of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation, took part in the conference of partner universities of the Directorate-General for Interpretation of the European Commission, which is held annually in Brussels, Belgium. It should be noted that only two Russian universities have access to this “private club” of the European Commission partners that train top-class language experts – these are Astrakhan State University and the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia. Only two Russian universities and their interpretation schools meet the high standards of the European Commission and the European Union in terms of training interpreters with different language combinations and Russian as the main working language. The conference lasted two days, after which the participants negotiated their cooperation with different partners, including the Directorate-General for Logistics and Interpretation for Conferences of the European Parliament. The annual conference of the DG SCIC partner universities not only allows to learn about the latest trends in the field of interpretation but also to understand what our employers expect from us. The fact is that the European Commission contributes a lot to the training of the Caspian School students and, as a potential employer, provides targeted and intensive educational support for our university. For example, DG-SCIC experts visit ASU on a regular basis in order to give classes, hold examinations and test our students. The conference is also an excellent networking platform for communication with the leading universities that teach interpretation in other EU countries, China, African states and countries of North and South America. Thanks to this conference, we learned that despite the decreased turnover between Russia and the EU, which was the case in the last few years, both this year and 2018 showed that the situation had improved significantly. According to the presented statistics on how often the Russian language is used at different events where interpretation is provided by DG SCIC experts, the use of Russian has increased by more than a third, which indicates that the number of negotiations both with Russia and with other CIS countries that use Russian to communicate with their foreign partners has increased. Thus, the prospects of cooperation with our European Commission partners is very positive. We were assured that we are needed as a platform for the training of high-skilled staff for Brussels, so they have high hopes for us. To prove that commitment, Liam Long, an interpreter of the Directorate-General for Interpretation of the European Commission, will again visit ASU on April 23, and in the meantime our first year students are preparing for a study visit to the EU institutions in June this year which will traditionally take place in Brussels. During the conference with our partners, we also reached a number of agreements on cooperation in CI training activities with different languages. For example, soon we are going to organize a virtual class with Boğaziçi University of Istanbul, which was our partner within a joint project for several years. What is more, this university is always interested in teaching the Azerbaijani language at our School. A virtual class with Turkish, Azerbaijani, English and Russian will be held very soon, being as always attended by our Azerbaijani and Turkish teachers. We also reached agreements on cooperation with our partners from Italy, France and Slovenia: we have already been implementing a number of projects together and also have submitted several joint applications for relevant international grants.