News

New academic year at SCIT begins

6 September 2021|

On 1 September SCIT celebrated the commencement of the new academic year.

Irina Alexeeva, SCIT Director, welcomed the new students with such words, “You will face difficulties, but you’de better overcome them with a smile. You will turn different people in a year’s time. Today is the first day on the way of serious changes, but for it to happen you have to put in your own efforts. Any quality education, and not in the field of translation only, is self-education.  We have come to this world with the only purpose – to learn it and one’s own place in it,  and such self-discovery is the discovery of the world”.

The new students were welcomed by Nikolay Lukichev, the Counselor of the Russian MFA in St. Petersburg, and by the trainers Yury Shashkov  and Sergey Afonin. They wished the novices to successfully start on the new stage in their personal development and strengthen the group community. The trainers remarked that the more effort would go into the training, the less stressful the professional life would be in the future.

Angelique Antonova, SCIT Deputy Director, underlined, “Your professional success will depend not on the knowledge you will acquire, but largely on how united you will be as a collective, how good you will be for each other as colleagues and friends “.

SCIT’s recent graduates and the trainers now engaged at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok greeted the new students, as well the graduates from previous years from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and even New York. Alexander Pankov, Herzen University graduate and presently editor at the Russian Verbatim Reports Section at UNHQ, told the newcomers about the work and possible internships in the UN in the UN. The all stressed that the School years gave knowledge as well as close friends and reliable colleagues. Angelina Pavlova, this year’s graduate, wished the new cohort a productive year, to support each other in any adversity and to lose no time at SCIT.

Institutional Translation Module from the Russian Section of the Verbatim Reports Service, UNHQ

15 July 2021|

On 6-12 July a module on institutional translation was organized for the Herzen-SCIT students by the Russian Section of the Verbatim Reports Service, UNHQ. This module is a part of the students’ internship, which was held distantly by Reviser Alexander Pankov. During the classes the students performed translations of the actual UN texts and discussed the results. Being a reviser, Alexander was very particular about the quality of the translation, trying to achieve clarity, accuracy and stylistic unity. The students had homework, which helped to make the classes really intensive.  One of the tasks was to identify the imperfections and inaccuracies in the translations done by other people, and it was a good reviser’s practice for the students. In general, the students found this module very useful, and would like to keep on studying with Alexander.

Internship Module with Kirill Kasyanov, Chief of the Russian Interpretation Section, UNON

12 July 2021|

From 28 June SCIT students started their internship program. The first internship module comprises intensive institutional interpretation classes with Kirill Kasyanov, head of the Russian Interpratation Section at UNON. This module has become a consolidation of the institutoinal interpreting skills acquired by the students during the distant master-classes with Mr. Kasyanov in the spring term at SCIT.  Mr. Kasyanov’s visit provided the students with the opportunity to meet their mentor in person, ask questions about the work at the UN, and go through many new UN speeches in the booth. Despite a busy week, which included also the conference for the Russian MFA representatives and the first days of the internship at the translation agencies, the students enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity to learn from such an experienced UN  interpreter as Kirill Kasyanov and heartily thanked him for the lessons.

SCIT graduates interpret in Geneva

17 June 2021|

On 16 June a Russia-US Summit took place in Geneva. We are proud that the talks between President Vladimir Putinand President Joe Biden, as well as the following press-conference of Russia’s President, were interpreted by SCIT graduates. The colleagues, including Americans, were unanimous in their high evaluation of the job done by our graduates. Congratualations to Daria Mandrova, Kirill Kazakov and Elizaveta Myshenkova! Well-done!

  

Virtual conference with DG SCIC

8 June 2021|

On 8 June SCIT held another virtual conference with DG SCIC. This was the last conference for this academic year, and during the class the trainers and students were able to estimate how well the students are prepared  for the final examinations. At the conference the students practiced the consecutive interpretation from Russian into English and from English into Russian. The speeches dealt with such topical issues as migration, digitalization and Keizen philosophy,  level of difficulty – advanced.  We are happy that the European experts noticed that the students coped rather well. We hope it promises good results at the finals!   We are grateful to Michael Sommers and Guy Laycock, DG SCIC interpreters, for the detailed commentary and valuable feedback.

SCIT takes part in 7 MoU Conference

20 May 2021|

On 17-19 May the 7th MoU Universities Conference was organized by the UN, and SCIT took an active part in this event. This year the conference was dedicated to the Power of Languages at the Time of Crisis.  The 3-day agenda was packed with discussions: participants from the universities around the globe and the UN services took stock of the network cooperation in these difficult times, analyzed the challenges and the solutions.  Carole Maisonneuve, United Nations Headquarters representative, updated the participants on the MoU activities and spoke about the impact the recent developments had on implementing the memorandum. We are happy that SCIT came in the top five of universities accroding to the number of internships and graduataes’ employability by the UN services.  This can be viewed as a logical outcome of the close cooperation between SCIT and the UN Russian linguistic services: the predominant majority of the graduates had internships at the UN linguistic services, which immensely facilitated the passing of the LCE for them. As of today, 22 SCIT graduated are staff UN translators and interpreters.

The conference participants shared their experience of adapting the trainig process o the new reality and spoke about the measures taken to ensure the quality of training so that the graduates could compete successfully at the LCEs.  Angelique Antonova, SCIT Deputy Director, addressed this issue in her presentation, and dwelt on the mixed format in the interpreter training in the present circumstances.  Sergey Afonin, SCIT translation trainer, shared his insights into organizing the virtual translation training sessions. The participants discussed the future of the remote technologies and AI systems for the T&I training and the set of new professional skills required of language specialists. Special attention was paid to the organization of remote internships, and we pleased that SCIT students will have their share of them, too.

The conference participants utilized the platforms Interprefy and Zoom.

Virtual conference with Warsaw University

11 May 2021|

On 28 April 2021 SCIT students had another virtual conference, this time with our EMCI partner-university – the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Warsaw University (Instytut Lingwistyki Stosowanej UW). The topic of the conference was Communication. The speeches in English, Russian and Polished up to 6 min. long were prepared by the trainers, native speakers of these languages. The interpreting was also practiced in different directions EN-RU, RU-EN, RU-PL, PL-RU-EN. All students showed good performance and received a lot of useful advice from the trainers from partner-universities.
Such conferences help the students to perfect their skills as practice before trainers and students from other universities makes the students concentrate, look at their skills from aside and get feedback from a different viewpoint and compare their level of achievement with that of other students. We are going to continue this useful practice!

SCIT’s cooperation with EMCI

9 April 2021|

On 9 April SCIT took part in the EMCI seminar on the future of the interpreter’s profession and the challenges of interpreter training in today’s world. The participants – mostly leaders of interpreter training programs at universitites and practicing interpreters themselves – discussed the latest tendencies in the interpreter labour market, the work conditions  and the use of remote interpretation platforms. The need to address the issues of remote interpreting in the training process is beyond doubt. EMCI has granted free access to the KUDO platform this year to be used in interpreter training, and SCIT makes an active use of it. The KUDO platform will be used for the EMCI student meeting on 21-23 April 2021. The possibility of granting free access to online interpretation platforms for all EMCI members for the next academic year is being discussed at the moment. Regular meetings and consultations with the world-renown industry experts, similar to the one on 9 April, helped the School to go through the tough pandemic period with the minimal damage to the training process.

Master classes of Kirill Kazakov, Russian MFA Interpreter

19 March 2021|

This week a series of master-classes of Kirill Kazakov, Russian MFA interpreter and SCIT graduate, has started at SCIT. Kirill has vast experience in interpreting on the highest level, for the top state officials; he is frequently invited to give talks on interpretation in the diplomatic  sphere at various T&I fora and meetings. For the SCIT master-classes Kirill  has prepared a special set of exercises to activate the diplomatic vocabulary, as well as speeches to train in the consecutive and simultaneous modes. The students jumped at the opportunity to ask him all kinds of questions about MFA interpreting, and Kirill gave direct and detailed answers. The students highly appreciated the class as very useful and intensive, and are looking forward to new meetings.

SCIT launches a translation project with WIPO

15 March 2021|

The new week at SCIT was marked by the launch of the new terminological project with WIPO. Alena Bakhtina, SCIT graduate 2018, who completed a temporary contract  with WIPO  in 2020, is actively involved in supervising the work, alonside SCIT trainers Angelique Antonova and Sergey Afonin.  The project deals with the subject area of dentistry and orthodontics, and each of the students is expected to research 7 recently introduced terms in their contextual usage to update the WIPO Pearl terminological base (https://www.wipo.int/reference/en/wipopearl/). The results are to be presented to WIPO in May 2021.