An Expert of the UN English Booth Shares Her Experience with MA Students of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation

The Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation actively develops cooperation with international organizations. On February 12-18, our interpreters-to-be for the first time welcomed Sarah Irene, a staff interpreter of the English booth of the UN Office at Vienna.
In the course of the classes, the MA students had a chance to improve their skills of retour – interpretation from their mother tongue into English – through different exercises prepared by the UN interpreter. One of them was a technique called “cutting”: a Russian sentence is divided into small parts that are interpreted with the use of linking words. This technique helps render effectively long sentences that are typical for Russian speakers. Sarah Irene paid special attention to synonyms and synonymic constructions; she said that an interpreter should know 5 different ways of expressing one and the same thought. Attention was also paid to the MA students’ note-taking skills: the expert shared a number of techniques designed to make consecutive note-taking more technical.
The students worked with a wide range of UN topics, from industrial development to nuclear disarmament. The expert focused on the activities of the UN Security Council, in particular regional conflicts. It helped not only enrich the vocabulary of the future experts but also improve their background knowledge. One of the formats of work in this direction was a mock conference where the students delivered speeches on international security, given at the Security Council meetings.
The MA students also practised their skills of anticipation, which help predict the train of speaker’s thought, and revised the procedural terminology that is widespread at different formal meetings where interpreters work.
The classes with Sarah Irene were held in a friendly and productive atmosphere which contributed to the overall progress. We hope that such intensive courses will become a good tradition in further cooperation between the United Nations and the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation.