CPD roundup: August 2026
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
Water Footprint nach ESRS – Wasser als strategischer Nachhaltigkeitsfaktor (DFGE Institute for Energy, Ecology and Economy)
Water footprint according to ESRS – water as a strategic sustainability factor
Recording: https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/3233926931858266115
Quite a technical webinar, with a lot of 'content' communicated in quite a short space of time. It looked at different reporting frameworks for companies to report on their water usage, specifically the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and the CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project). Obviously as a translator, the decision about which reporting standard to use is made way before I get involved in any reporting, but it's still interesting to know about the different factors.
Entreprendre : le digital dans l'agriculture (Fondation FARM)
Tacking the digital in agriculture
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCiXl1L29XE
The thing I enjoyed most about this discussion was the fact that it fronted the speaker from Rwanda – a country that most people in Europe don't think about when they think of farmers. But they have the same problems around embedding useful digital technologies in agricultural practices, plus some extra challenges that are worth considering. One of the other speakers made a very interesting – though as they admitted imperfect – comparison between the state of agriculture in Rwanda today and Europe's situation in the immediate post-war years. The discussion also looked at other examples from around the world of how digital technologies can be used to benefit farmers on the ground.