Welcome to October’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
BIM trifft Nachhaltigkeit – Praxisnahe Integration im Planungsprozess (Madaster)
BIM meets sustainability – practical integration into the planning process
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJKFgSfitfw
Inevitably a bit of a salesy webinar, in that a large part of it was about the software solution on offer, but an interesting insight into the process of assessing the environmental impact of construction work of various kinds. One thing I did really appreciate about this webinar was the focus on being realistic about the amount and complexity of the source that needs to be – or even can be – gathered. The emphasis was on building up nuance over time, rather than trying to do everything right from the beginning.
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.
This month's text was quite an interesting one, all about the challenges of balancing the natural desire to travel with the environmental impacts of doing so at the quickest possible pace. It was quite an academic text but meant to be published online, and we got the impression that it had probably originally been much longer but had been edited down for reasons of space. That meant there were some slightly odd things in the structure of the original text – like jumping backwards and forwards in the chronology – and the logical links between some sections were not immediately obvious, so we had some interesting discussions about whether it is the translator's job (or place) to put those connections back in.