On 9 December SCIT held another seminar within the frame of the Terra Translatologica project. This time the seminar was devoted to translation and interpreting from Oriental languages.  SCIT director Irina Alexeeva opened the meeting and introduced the speakers. She said, “It is a forum for discussions. The seminar started as a quarterly  meeting, and there were a lot of people coming, because we invite people to discuss broad topics, not something specialized or theoretical. We invite the people who take translation and interpreting out of the box, who have their own  view on translation. This forum is called to outline the existing problems and offer solutions.” She pointed that the speakers  chose topics for their presentations themselves, and invited all participants to join in the discussion. The topics of the four key speakers varied from the ethnocultural training of interpreters to the special difficulties of the Filipino language. Answewring the question about the place taken by translation in the speakers’ lives they said, “Part of my profession”, “part of my self-identification”, “career launch”, “my life balance”. Despite the distant mode of the seminar the discussions proved to be warm, stimulating and productive. The two key takeaways from the meeting are the following:

  1. It is time to provide a more intensive trainig to translators and interpreters from Oriental languages.
  2. It is time to develop the theory of translation taking into account the expreience of translation and interpreting from /to Oriental languages