CPD roundup: June 2026
Welcome to June’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
CO2-Bilanz: Scope 3 Deep Dive (Scope 3.1-3.6) (Cubemos)
Carbon Footprint: Scope 3 Deep Dive (Scopes 3.1-3.6)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpDr98Xn8Y
Detailed and really quite technical - I think this is one that I may be revisiting again in future! The webinar went through scopes 3.1 to 3.6 of the GHG reporting protocols, examining what is included in each one and what calculation methodologies are available for each one in different circumstances. I won't pretend to have memorised all of it, but forutnately it is recorded for future reference. If you're interested, there is also a demo of the tool itself as part of the presentation.
Et si l'élevage faisait partie de la solution ? (Fondation FARM)
What if animal rearing were part of the solution?
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRT--3c1cbk
This was an interesting session about different elements of the debate around raising animals for food production. A lot of the conversation focused on pastoralism, which included some considerations I had thought about before. If I have a criticism of the conversation it's that it was fairly light on the specific examples that I have come to expect of the Fondation FARM's Transition series. But it was interesting nevertheless.
The Benefits of Combining a Systems Approach with Behavioural Insights (Visionary Project)
Recording: not yet released
I feel a bit silly only becoming aware of this project right at the end, but it's great that I've got a whole new world to read about. This was the opening session of a full day, and I need to catch up on the rest, but it was interesting. They talked a lot about their methodology, and particularly emphasised the participation of "stakeholders" (a word I have come to hate) in developing the interventions at "Science-Policy Interfaces" (SPIs).
Science de l’impact : quels apports de la recherche aux pratiques des acteurs ? (Fondation FARM)
Impact science: How does research contribute to practice?
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzNz5SVPLyg
This was a webinar in three parts, of which I would say the middle component was the most analytical - the other two being somewhat more anecdotal. That isn't to say that they didn't make valid points, but it was the middle section that really brought new perspectives. It talked about how to measure impact at different stages of a project depending on what exactly each stage is meant to achieve, and how the results gathered from previous stages set up subsequent stages.
Mobiliser les acteurs publics et privés (Fondation FARM)
Mobilising public and private actors
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itdxowU61kc
Quite a vague title, but this was part of the Fondation FARM conference, and it was about the role of finance in susatinable agriculture, focusing particularly on farming in the Global South. As a translator, I was intrigued to see that there was a multilingual element, which was handled quite nicely. Overally it was a wide-ranging discussion, with some interesting snippets. In particular, the points raised about the different scales of available funding were new to me.
Netzwerk Energieeffizienz - Podiumsdiskussion (Forschungsschwerpunkt Energie, Umwelt & Nachhaltigkeit)
Energy Efficiency Network – Podium discussion
I have to say, my heart sank a little when I saw how many people were on this panel, but I was pleasantly suprised how closely it managed to stay on topic! There was far too much to summarise here, but it's clear that there are challenges to implementing mass energy sharing, It's worth staying until the end of the Q&A though to hear from the representative of an energy co-op hat it can actually be done. (Side note: As a linguist, I was fascinated to see German grammar being applied to a new English loan word in the form of the "Energysharender" - 'energy sharers', '-er' being the suffix for 'ones' and '-end' being roughly equivalent to '-ing', so literally 'the energy sharing ones'.)
Les légumineuses, graines de star (Fondation FARM)
Legumes, star seeds
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NztDKz-fw6U
This discussion did pretty much what it said on the tin - talked about the importance of legumes to the future of gariculture. The most interesting part, to my mind at least, was the section in the middle where a nutritionist talked briefly about the nutrition profile of legumes. I didn't know for instance that the minerals in legumes are harder to access than in other food sources. The panel was mostly very complimentary about the benefits of legumes when it comes to soil health and their place in our diets, but it did also briefly discuss some of the challenges.