CPD roundup: May 2025

Welcome to May’s CPD round-up!

This is where I share a quick summary of the continuing profession development (CPD) I’ve completed during the month.

The Institute of Translation and Interpreting recommends that all members, including Qualified Members (MITIs) like me, do at least 30 hours of CPD per year. I normally end up doing rather more than that, 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

Birds: Surveys, impacts and mitigation (RSK)

Recording: https://rskgroup.com/webinars/birds-surveys-impacts-and-mitigation/

To be perfectly honest, this was an aspect of environmental surveying that I had never really thought about it in detail. I knew the broad strokes, of course, about surveying for birds (primarily as part of the planning process) at different times of year, different times of day etc., but this introduced me to a whole new world of techniques, standards and tools that I wasn’t familiar with. It also covered various mitigation methods, some of which are specific to particular sites or construction plans. Well worth watching back if you’re not already an expert in these areas.

Enabling Technologies For Transportation Electrification (CSES)

Recording: not recorded

This was put on at my local university by the Chelmsford Science and Engineering Society, and it was quite a dense talk in content. Some of the issues covered included balancing cost and range, particularly in terms of recharging speed, the lack of investment in the infrastructure, the benefits and challenges of storing energy in hydrogen and the importance of power electronics. I also learned a fun fact that the earliest electric vehicle was actually invented in 1828, so it’s not such a new fad after all!

Regenerating Nature: Integrating Biodiversity with Food Systems (Sustainable Foods 2026)

Recording: https://streamyard.com/watch/GGVwifNGi2bk

This was essentially a round-table format, featuring speakers from different branches of the food industry. And as these sorts of conversations tend to, the conversation went off in all sorts of different directions. There’s a summary of the key questions in the link above, but some of the points I noted down included clearly setting out the value of regenerative food whilst at the same time working out where the increased cost is going to fall – much as we might like it to, any model based on the consumer paying more is not likely to be effective in the long term. It’s also a much more complex way of producing food, and it will take time to transition a critical mass of the farming system towards it – there was, however, some optimism about the willingness of key stakeholders, including financial isntitutions, to engage on the issue.

Regenerative Agriculture: The Future Of Food And Farming? (CSES/ARU Writtle)

Recording: not recorded

Another talk at the local university, this time arranged by the CSES and the ARU Writtle (until recently Writtle Agricultural College). It was a bit of a whistle-stop tour of the major challenges in the food system. One interesting angle that I think gets lost in these debates is that most of the world’s farming takes place on a small scale – 72% of farming takes place on sites smaller than 1 hectare. These small scale farms are usually more productive than larger farms, but then they’re mostly producing for their own needs, not for market. The speaker also talked about some other interesting trends within the food sector, such as the increasing integration of supply chains (led by retailers), the expansion of the JIT section of that market, and the fact that food is increasingly being traded internationally rather than consumer directly.

KI & Nachhaltigkeit: Wie Unternehmen mit KI ihre ESG-Ziele erreichen (Yakup Özkardes-Cheung)
[AI & Sustainability: How companies can use AI to achieve their ESG goals]

Recording: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7293763393541337088/

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I’m a bit of an AI-sceptic, at least when it comes to translation. But I can acknowledge that it has a place in certain areas – and that includes anything to do with number-crunching and analysis. There is always a risk with these sorts of processes that the automation takes any actual thinking or reasoning out of the equation, and corporate reporting becomes a sort of tick-box exercise, rather than an opportunity to reflect and learn. That said, there were some interesting ideas in here, and some tools I hadn’t heard of.

Les engrais peuvent-ils être nos amis ? (Fondation FARM)
[Can fertilisers be our friends?]

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8JeVggcFFc&feature=youtu.be

One thing that I always enjoy about Fondation FARM talks is that they take a very proactive approach to making sure that voices from all around the world are integrated into their discussions. In this case, it would have been very easy to only include the opinions of farmers operating within France (or Global North Francophone countries), but they made a point of also seeking out the views of speakers from the Global South (notably Western Africa in this case). There are unique challenges in this region, like the fact that the limited amount of synthetic fertilisers available (a situation that continues to be exacerbated by the war in Ukraine) is primarily directed towards producing cotton, rather than to arable farmers. The discussion also covered some interesting points around the regulation of biofertilisers and the fact that biodiversity is important, but it has to be viewed through a regional lens, not just on a farm-to-farm basis.

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.

A bit of a different text this time, one of my colleagues chose a text about an art project in Luxembourg. It was an interesting text in many ways – for one thing, it was written in an unusually ‘oral’ style for a French-language text. Without wishing to make any sweeping generalisations, written French tends to be rather more structured than English writing. The kind of first-person, highly personal style that is so popular in English articles (like the one I’m using as I write this) is less common – not unheard of, of course, but not the standard for this sort of piece. So it was interesting to work out what we should do with the overall tone of the translation. Similarly, some of the content was quite abstract, and not always clearly explained, so we had to do quite a lot of inferring and trying to decipher from context what exactly we thought the author was trying to say. An interesting challenge all round!