Virtual class with the interpreters of the European Commission!

A virtual class with the experts from the Directorate General for Interpretation of the European Commission took place on May 30. The conference was one of the last for the second year MA students, as very soon they will take the final exams and obtain their coveted diplomas. It is not that everything has just started for the first year MA students: since September, they have also participated in the virtual classes one by one, taking a shot at consecutive and simultaneous interpretation during such classes. Fernando Leitão, the Head of the E-Learning sector at DG SCIC, was the moderator of the conference; Antoinette Legrand and Michael Somers were the speakers and the assessors who evaluated our students’ interpretations, as well as Liam Long, who will come to Astrakhan in two-week time to be the member of the State Assessment Committee during the final examination. The Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation was represented by Nataliya Tutarinova, Yuliya Ibragimova, Elena Yakovleva and Alfiya Salkhenova, who also delivered speeches and commented on students’ performance.

Familiar faces are on both sides of the screen, but speech topics are never the same. This time our students succeeded in practicing their interpreting skills in truly different topics – from positive and negative effects of wine to the question of whether we need prisons. It’s worth noticing that the class wasn’t limited to the Russian and English language combination; the French language was also practiced by the MA students Svetlana Zaitseva and Anastasia Antonova.

This type of class is very rewarding because – and this time is not an exception – there are pure customers (those listeners who don’t understand the source language, and therefore can assess only the interpretation) among the participants, and also the assessors who can give valuable feedback on the message of the interpretations, as well as on the students’ presentations. We are looking forward to meeting with our colleagues from Brussels again!