CITS Students Keep Improving Their Skills with MFA Russia Experts

Last Wednesday, CITS students took part in a virtual master class by Andrey Zavarukhin, 3rd Secretary of the Department of Linguistic Support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, who has already had vast experience of working with our students in the course of his visits to Astrakhan State University. This time, the expert chose Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull’s telephone conversations for the online interpreting session. Olga Odnobokova, a first-year MA student, describes how the class was:

“Attending the master class with Andrey Zavarukhin, we not only had a chance to practise interpretation but also to test our awareness of current political and economic issues. After a short warm-up session, the expert asked us about the latest national and global news. As always, the session was dynamic, interesting and very practical.”

Having worked with the telephone conversations, the students moved on to sight translation. In fact, it was just a warm-up before simultaneous interpretation. The “speaker” was none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin, who talked about environmental issues and nuclear energy and continually challenged the interpreters with some hard rows to hoe like “obscurantism”.

After the intensive master class with A. Zavarukhin, our MA students met with Acting Head of the Vocabulary & Terminology Department Elena Brokhovich, who spoke in detail about how the terminology department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs works. The department’s staff works with topical dictionaries, atlases, translations of the Bible and the Quran, prepares terminology booklets and helps translators of the MFA Russia in gaining insight on concepts and terms. The master-class was especially useful for the second-year students who are finalizing their projects for the World Intellectual Property Organization these days, since finding the right term is not always easy, or rather, almost always difficult. Valentina Alekseenko, a second-year MA student, shared her impressions of the master class:

“The master class with Elena Brokhovich was very interesting and informative. In our daily life, we regularly practise in compiling glossaries for interpretation correctly, and my graduation thesis is also connected with terminology. The expert suggested a program used by the Russian Foreign Ministry to find terms and translation for them, and it’ll be of use in our work as well.”