Final State Examinations at the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation

The second year MA students of The Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation are days away from completing their studies at Astrakhan State University. Many of them already wonder how they will celebrate their graduation, make plans for the summer and think about their careers… Two years have practically flown by. There will be no farewell bell like in school, but the atmosphere of solemnity and festivity can be felt in every moment. These summer days are especially memorable for the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation MA students, as very soon the graduation ceremony will take place.
During this time they have grasped all the intricacies of translating difficult political, economic and other texts; they have mastered their skills and competencies of consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. The MA students have often been engaged as interpreters in international events and meetings; they have participated in master classes with prominent interpreters and translators, and in videoconferences with the world’s leading universities. The students have learned a lot – they’ve acquired theoretical knowledge, and applied it in practice of real interpreting. Now they are going to use their experience in Russia and, hopefully, abroad.
Karina Kulova, the second year MA student of The Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation, who showed excellent training results, shares her impressions: ‘I will never forget a legend we had been told by an interpreter while interning at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. He compared an interpreter with a cat which falls from a height and doesn’t know whether it will land on all four feet. The same with the work of a simultaneous interpreter: he doesn’t know what the next speaker’s thought will be, whether he has chosen the right register from the beginning, whether he will be able to agree the predicate with the subject. However, every interpreter has to land with grace – to logically finish each sentence in accordance with the language standards and the speaker’s style.
And we, the second year MA students, had to show this exact skill during our final state examinations which took place on 16-18 June. According to the legend, Prophet Mohammad gave the cat the gift of landing on its feet, but in our case the whole professorship of the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation has been training us for the state exam. For two years, under their guidance, we have been studying consecutive and simultaneous interpretation from foreign languages into our native one, and vice versa. A lot of things are behind these two years: sleepless nights when we tried to memorize different glossaries (truly various – from welding to women’s cosmetics); hours spent on writing perfect speeches for interpretation (I guess that after our composing so many speeches, we could also receive diplomas in Speechwriting and Oral Communication specialty); numerous translating tasks (because we don’t want to lose such a valuable segment on the labour market). However, in spite of this intensive preparation, we were still very nervous on the eve of the exam. No wonder: 3 days, 8 examiners, including Liam Long, a leading interpreter of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Interpretation, and Vladimir Lakeev, a leading interpreter of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation; 4 different speeches for consecutive and simultaneous interpretation.
In the end, we all successfully passed the exam; we all landed on our feet and didn’t let our trainers down, who had developed our talents.
Personally for me, this exam has marked the ending of the chapter in my life called ‘The Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation’ and the beginning of the new one, no less exciting. But what will be the title of it? Well, we see… The most important thing is that I’ve learned how to land!’