CPD roundup: September 2026
Welcome to September’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
Comment reconnecter le grand public et les agriculteurs ? (Hectarea)
How can we reconnect consumers and farmers?
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRqEiwXSj8Q
A bit of a whistlestop tour of different organisations all trying to achieve the same thing, which is rebuilding the connections between farmers and the consumers they serve. The talk was organised by Hectarea, which is a platform that enables investors to invest directly in agricultural land, but also represented were Gueules de Paysans and Bobine, both agricultural media organisations, and Parcel, which provides holiday accommodation in various "natural" settings, including working farms. They talked about their desire to reestablish the sorts of human connections that agriculture used to be reliant on, though the webinar as a whole was far too short to get into much detail.
Die Bedeutung von Textanalysen und Narrativen für Energiemärkte und Nachhaltigkeit (Fernuni-Hagen)
The importance of text analysis and narratives for energy markets and sustainability
If you've read a few of these blogs, you might remember the name FernUniversität in Hagen, because I am slowly working my way through their archive of talks on "energy, environment and sustainability". And my progress through them is quite slow, because they are rigorously academic presentations and generally quite complex, so you need a bit of time between them to digest the ideas. In this case, the speaker spent quite a lot of time on the methodology of turning qualitative data like newspaper articles into quantitative data on moods before getting into the outcomes of the some of the studies he and colleagues have conducted. Very interesting - be prepared to pause to take notes.
Conférence FARM 2 - Intensifier la coopération (Fondation FARM)
FARM Conference 3: Intensifying cooperation
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULyRTxlxzQ8
These roundtables always take on vast topics, and there's never enough time to get into them properly, but there were a few interesting takeaways from this talk. For example, I was quite struck by the idea of a different understanding of intensification – moving away from intensification of inputs towards intensification of cooperation and collaboration. The point was also made that intensification of inputs has also massively simplified processes, whereas we need to learn to accept and manage complexity in our agricultural systems.
Klimarisiken verstehen, Chancen nutzen: Praxisimpulse für die Unternehmensstrategie (DFGE Institute for Energy, Ecology and Economy)
Understanding climate risks, taking advantage of opportunities: Practical insights for corporate strategy
Recording: https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/4265626179992543328
I would say this webinar focused more on the 'risks' element than the 'opportunities' element, but it was a useful reminder of the framework through which businesses and organisations think about the challenges in front of us – and what is most likely to be convincing to them. I do also always appreciate the brevity, and therefore concentration, of the DFGE's webinars.
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.
After a bit of a summer break, revision club returned with a review of the documentary Fuck la planète. Beyond dealing with the Franglais nature of the film itself, the main challenges of this text were 1) balancing the tone, which had to be authoritative but still engaging and 2) managing all of the expansions and glosses required to fill in the cultural gaps for a non-French reader. For example, something we did have to think about quite carefully is the fact that the Industrial Revolution is not conceptualised in exactly the same way in French and English history, so deciding whether we could use the terms interchangeably was a challenge.