Further Training for Practicing Interpreters and Translators

In spite of the fact that an increasing number of professional interpreters and translators are graduates of Translation schools, many have come to the profession from other fields and activities. There is no reason for this to stop, as long as interpretation and translation are not legally restricted to profession­als holding official qualification. On the other hand, many self-taught profes­sionals feel they would benefit from further training in some basic technical skills, and even Translation professionals who have been through formal training often wish to strengthen such skills as well as increase their familiarity with one or several specialized fields, or even their passive or active profi­ciency in one of their working languages. Consequently, there is some demand for additional training as well, as suggested by the high registration in work­shops and seminars designed for professionals in countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Hong Kong, and Japan, where such workshops have been offered.

Long programs like those designed for ordinary students over one or several years are not suited to the needs of professionals, who can ill afford to stop working for such a length of time to go over ground already covered to a large extent, in order to pick up some useful elements here and there. This is why workshops for practicing professionals are generally short (one or two days), or segmented into evening sessions.

Practitioners with field experience can more easily grasp some concepts that seem quite abstract to beginning students. It follows that course design should differ in both content and approach, depending on whether training aims at introducing beginning students to Translation or at strengthening a practicing profession­al's expertise. In particular, in the latter case, training may consist of custom­ized efforts focused on particular sub-components of Translation expertise: note-taking in consecutive, legal interpreting, translation in computer science, patent translation, etc.