ESG Principles Build the Future: CITS Holds the First Mock Conference of 2022

The mock conference was organized by the Caspian Higher School of interpreting and Translation and was the first conference the school held entirely online.

On January 31, the Zoom session brought together MA students of the first and second study years. The mock conference focused on ESG, Agile, and Waterfall models.

In a broad sense, ESG promotes sustainable development of business activities and is built on the following principles:

• responsible attitude to the Environment;

• high Social responsibility;

• high quality of corporate Governance.

Agile, or Agile software development, is a flexible approach to the development of software or other projects which is often used by small teams. The whole process of working on a project is divided into iterations – short cycles of two to three weeks. The principles of ESG and Agile are a very topical issue today, both for large global companies and for startups, government agencies, and even in the sphere of education. Our university and, in particular, our school are no exception. The CITS team has been using the Agile approach in their work for a long time, and it has been quite successful. This time, we decided to share our knowledge and the experience of professionals in this field with students. Our MA students not only got a great opportunity to practise simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, but also got acquainted with this trend.

The students were asked to outline roles in advance to prepare for the event: some of the students organized, chaired and moderated this session, others took on the roles of company representatives, journalists, interpreters and guests of the event, who also asked questions and actively participated in the discussion. Moreover, real representatives of such large Russian companies as VEB.RF, Skolkovo Technopark and Evola LLC took part in the conference. The experts delivered their speeches both in Russian and in English, and the MA students interpreted them consecutively. The topic of the conference is very relevant, so the speakers covered issues related to the principles of ESG, Agile and Waterfall both in general terms and on the example of individual approaches and principles of company management.

This level of interaction is very beneficial for the first- and second-year students, as they gain valuable experience in conference interpreting and remote interpretation which is becoming increasingly popular. The feedback, provided by CITS trainers, was a very important element for analysis of the conference results and summarized the experience of the first online mock conference held by the school. Mock conferences are an important stage in interpretation training, since they help practise interpretation in close-to-real working conditions, broaden students’ horizons and give an insight into the principles of conference management.