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.