The celebration of the Translator Day in the School followed a busy working day: on top of the usual classes, the students attended a master class of Andrey Falaleev, a trainer of simultaneous interpreting from Monterey. The gist of the training was to make students to grasp the meaning of the phrase, instantly adjusting the style and “fighting off a knee-jerk reaction to substitute Russian words by the English ones”. It would seem the student had not a drop of energy left after the three days of Liam Long’s master classes, but no! they were as fresh and as willing to work as before.

A nice introduction to the celebration was the videolink to the expert roundtable discussion on Interpreters in Conflict Zones, taking place simultaneously in Boston and Geneva. Olga Cosmidou, Director General of the DG INTE, European Parliament, took place in this videocast. Also, the students had a chance to hear and see Barbara Moser-Mercier – head of the School of Interpretation and Translation in Geneva and supervisor of our joint project.

The celebration opened with the presentation of the last year’s “crop”: besides the textbooks written by the School trainers Liang Cuizhen (“Chinese Interpretation”) and Irina Martianova and Valentina Cherniak (“Russian for Interpreters”), there was a number of literary translations done by the School trainers. Among them are “Gondolatok a Kapitalizmusról” by Kornai János and “Jamrach’s Menagerie” by Carol Birch, both translated by Oxana Yakimenko, “Los Girasoles Ciegos” by Alberto Méndez and “Jardines Segredos de Mogador” by Alberto Ruy Sanchez, both translated by Vladimir Litus, poems by Celso Emilio Ferreiro translated by Yuri Shashkov and Maria Tolstaya, a complex philosophical essay by Marcelino Agis Villaverde “Camiñantes: Un Iterario Filosofico” done by Maria Tolstaya. The colleagues pleased us all proving again that the simultaneous is not the only craft to earn one’s bread with. There were many guests, though mostly the birds of our nest, the graduates.The new students entertained all present with a potpourri political performance; the graduates showed slides from their trip around the US west coast; the Kazakh diplomats said a few kind words about the School…

Our band of friends is growing! Congratulations!