CPD roundup: August 2025
Welcome to August’s CPD round-up!
This is where I share a quick summary of the CPD I’ve completed during the month.
What is CPD?
CPD is short for ‘continuing professional development’, and it’s a requirement of many different professions, taking a slightly different form in each profession. Essentially, it’s a commitment to carry on learning about and improving your knowledge and skills even after you have finished your formal education. It can take a variety of different forms, from formal training and courses to self-directed studying and even collaborative activities like peer revision and mentoring.
This commitment to ongoing, iterative and intentional improvement is one of the things that sets human translators apart from machine translation. Where machine learning systems can only improve by absorbing ever more data, human translators learn by identifying weaknesses and exchanging ideas and views about best practices.
The Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) recommends that all members, including Qualified Members (MITIs) like me, do at least 30 hours of CPD per year. The Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) also has the same requirement, and Chartered Linguists like me can have their CPD records audited at any time to make sure we are staying on track.
As a specialist sustainability translator, I normally end up doing rather more than just 30 hours, and I normally only include subject-knowledge CPD (and sometimes some translation skills CPD) in this public summary.
You can find out about the other types of CPD that the ITI recommends here and my previous summaries here.
Subject knowledge
Die Zukunft ist digital – aber auch nachhaltig? (Glacier)
The Future is Digital – but is it sustainable as well?
Recording: https://www.glacier.eco/resources/deepdive-die-zukunft-ist-digital-aber-auch-nachhaltig
This was quite an in-depth and technical webinar on the challenges of improving the efficiency of modern digital infrastructure – particularly, but not exclusively, in terms of cooling data centres. One new term to me was ‘dark data’, which refers to data that is stored but never used – this apparently representing up to two-thirds of the world’s data. After an overview of the challenges, there was a detailed discussion of some of the practical things that can be done, and the kinds of systems and background conditions that need to be considered when trying to optimise data centres.
SBTi Net-Zero Standard 2.0: Was Unternehmen jetzt wissen müssen (DFGE Institute for Energy, Ecology and Economy)
SBTi Net-Zero Standard 2.0: What companies need to know now
Recording: only available to participants
I had a bit of spare time at the end of this month, so I managed to catch up on a few recordings. Including two from the FDGE. This first one was quite a dense and technical exploration of the new version of the SBTi Net Zero standard. It explained that although the core goal of the standard has not changed, some of the ways in which goals are defined and emissions measured have changed, particularly in terms of the distinction between Scope 1 and Scope 2, location- vs. market-based approaches and the greater emphasis on residual emissions.
Kreislaufwirtschaft für Unternehmen: Herausforderungen und Lösungen (DFGE Institute for Energy, Ecology and Economy)
The Circular Economy for Companies: Challenges and Solutions
Recording: only available to participants
This second DFGE webinar was perhaps a little less technical than the last one, but no less detailed. In particular, I think the summary of key problems and actors in this area was particularly clear. I also liked that it categorised the 10 “R”s (Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Refurbish, Remanfacture, Repurpose, Recycle and Recover) by their level of circularity and the level of innovation required (with refuse being the most circular and the most radical and recover being the least circular and least innovative – or ‘incremental’).
Verschnaufpause oder nicht? Expertenrunde zum EU Omnibus Paket (Glacier)
Breathing Space? Expert panel on the EU Omnibus Package
Recording: https://www.glacier.eco/resources/webinar-grant-thornton-eu-omnibus
I’ll be honest, the Omnibus Package is not something I’ve really got my head round properly yet. I’m aware of the broad strokes – or at least those that have been announced so far – but the actual detail seemed fairly impenetrable. I can only imagine what it’s like for companies having to navigate the reporting requirements. I won’t attempt to summarise it all here, but I will say that the speaker did a really good job, as one would expect, of separating what we do know from what we don’t know yet. I also really liked the idea of “no-regret” activities – proactive steps that companies will almost certainly benefit from doing now, as they will almost certainly have to do them within the next few years no matter how the reporting regime changes.
Conversation biodiversité : quels indicateurs pour quels contextes ? (Workshops for Biodiversity (Ateliers pour la biodiversité))
Biodiversity Conversation: Which indicators for which contexts?
Recording: only available to participants
Again, quite a dense webinar that covered a fair amount of ground. Different researchers shared their work on developing biodiversity indicators for different settings and uses. It also go into the complex ways that indicators have to interact if they are to provide meaningful insights into gains or losses, and into the challenge of establishing the reliability of indicators – though because of the time restrictions, only at a fairly superficial level. One of the speakers mentioned that they decided their indicators had to be ‘SMART+C’, which is the classic Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely, plus Communicable. It was really heartening to see the emphasis on communicability being built right into the start of the scientific process – it doesn’t happen all the time!
Translation skills
Revision club
A revision club is a peer-learning exercise where a small group of translators get together to sharpen our translation skills. This normally involves one person translating a document as practice and the others reviewing it for potential improvements. It can also take the form of a ‘slam’, where everybody in the group translates the same text and then compares versions.
We were very much in holiday mode in this month’s revision club, looking at a text about the proliferation of ‘kid-free’ (or should that be ‘child-free’?) holiday options. It was an interesting text to work on because parts of it seemed didn’t seem to quite fit together, implying that perhaps it had been longer but edited down. Good translators will tend to smooth over these sorts of issues, but it can be challenging. And of course, we wouldn’t be translators if we didn’t have an argument about hyphenation in compound adjectives…