I participated in the 2nd International Teaching Translation and Interpreting Conference in Łódź, Poland. The title of my paper was: “How effective is teaching note-taking to trainee interpreters?”. The abstract is below.

University-level programmes in conference interpreting typically feature an introductory course in note-taking for consecutive interpreting. Although a note-taking system is a matter of individual preferences, it is generally accepted that students should be exposed to various note-taking techniques (Rozan 1957, Matyssek 1989, Gillies 2005) in order to develop their own autonomous systems.
The paper first presents the content of a course in note-taking for consecutive interpreting, featuring such elements as visualizations, structural analysis, layout, linking devices and symbols. It then describes a study involving course participants and conducted a few weeks after the end of the course to determine what skills learned and developed in class are applied by trainees in practice.
14 interpreting trainees were asked to consecutively interpret a text from Polish into their B language (English or German). The participants’ notes were analysed in terms of their layout, language and symbols. Additionally, the students were asked to complete a questionnaire to assess the note-taking course quality and to provide some introspective data about visualizations they used as memory prompts in the experimental task. The results shed some light on the usefulness of note-taking courses in interpreter training contexts.

I have just returned from Trieste where I held guess lectures at Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori (which is part of the University of Trieste). My trip was funded under the LLP Erasmus Teacher Mobility Scheme. My stay in Trieste proved very enriching, both as regards teaching methods and potential research projects. Not to mention capuccini in bi and the absolutely mind-blowing city of Venice.

A team of researchers headed by Prof. Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, including Prof. Alicja Pisarska, Dr. Iwona Mazur and myself, has received a research grant from the Polish Ministry of Higher Education and Science (N N104 178236) for AD-Verba, a project devoted to developing standards for Polish audio description. The project will last 30 months and will help promote AD in Poland and develop research on the production and perception of AD.