August, the month of the Edinburgh festival, the time of the year where our beautiful city becomes for a few weeks the centre of the cultural world. If you have ever dreamt about coming over to have a look for yourself but never found the right excuse. We have just found you one! Heriot Watt […]
Category: Interpreting
Crowdsourcing and the Shrinking Middle
So, with the creation of new tech firm VerbalizeIT, the world has another company that says they can reduce the cost of translation and interpreting. It’s not as if the idea itself is that new. Regular LifeinLINCS readers, will remember our posts on NTT Docomo (among others), who offered a similar service. The difference this […]
Court Interpreting: The Quest for Data
By now, no one even seems surprised at another case of poor court interpreting in England and Wales. After three government enquiries, numerous newspaper articles and judgment after judgment, it is actually becoming hard for the flaws in the new system to gain any headlines at all. After all, it is only so often that […]
IPCITI Comes to Heriot-Watt
Last week we announced that the BAAL conference is shortly coming to Heriot-Watt. This week we are pleased to announce that the International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting (IPCITI) will be taking place here on 14-16th November too. The IPCITI Conference is the result of a long-term collaboration between Dublin City University, Heriot-Watt University, […]
Being There
What’s the difference between an interpreter and a translator? Most people reading this blog probably already know the answer. Interpreters work with signed and/or spoken language; translators work with written language. Still, for the most part, there is an even more obvious difference. Despite the growth of remote and video interpreting, it is still typically […]
Heriot-Watt Goes to Holyrood
Heriot-Watt students doing the MSc in Conference Interpreting got to go to Holyrood – the Scottish Parliament, that is; for some dummy-booth practice. These sessions, organised for small groups of motivated students, take place a few months into their training; at an ideal time to enable them to evaluate their progress and start to get […]
The Importance of Messy Interpreting
It’s a sad fact that interpreting is still not seen as a particularly difficult and useful skill by many members of the public. After all, it’s just like having a walking dictionary, isn’t it? Interpreters hear words in one language and find their equivalents in another. Surely a computer could do the job. Professionals might […]
Responsible Interpreting pt. 2
A few days ago, we posted the first part of my interview with Robyn Dean, sign language interpreter and researcher. This week, in the second part, we talk about whether research is any use to practicing professionals and why even busy professionals can help shape the future of their profession.
Responsible Interpreting pt. 1
The recent controversy over the Ministry of Justice interpreting contract has brought to the fore just how much interpreting suffers from a lack of status. In this two part interview with sign language interpreter and researcher, Robyn Dean, I had the chance to discuss with her how her work on interpreter ethics might help strengthen […]
Keep Changing the Public Face of Languages
If some of today’s post seems familiar, it should be! Given the continuing saga of UK court interpreting, dropping numbers of students doing languages and the rise and rise of machine translation apps, it is just as important to shape people’s perceptions of languages as it was just over a year ago when Changing the […]