CPD Roundup: December 2023
Welcome to December’s CPD round-up! This is where I share a quick summary of the continuing profession development (CPD) I’ve completed during the month.
The Institute of Translation and Interpreting recommends that all members, including Qualified Members (MITIs) like me, do at least 30 hours of CPD per year. I normally end up doing rather more than that, and I normally only include subject-knowledge CPD (and sometimes some translation skills CPD) in this public summary. You can find out about the other types of CPD that the ITI recommends here and my previous summaries here.
December is always a bit of a busy month, and this year was no exception, with an awful lot needing to get done before the Christmas break. This meant that I didn’t manage to squeeze in much live CPD, but the downtime between Christmas at the new year did give me time to catch up on quite a few interesting sessions, detailed below!
Subject knowledge
Energy Security & Green Infrastructure Week (part 2)
Continuing on from last month’s round-up, here are the Energy Security & Green Infrastructure Week sessions that I took some time to catch up on in December:
Interview with Zion Lights, Founder, Emergency Reactor.
UKAEA: The Future of Fusion
Fuelling the Future: Britain’s Big Nuclear Fuel Opportunity
Public Charging: How do we get the right EV charging, in the right place, and ensure it’s equitable?
Onsite Power: Is an onsite power purchase agreement right for you? How will you power your EV fleet?
Natural Capital: How important are nature-based solutions in the response to climate change?
HS2’s Old Oak Common Station: A Green Super-hub in the Heart of London
Green Infrastructure – The (Not So) Secret Ingredient to Deliver Cost Effective, Climate Resilient Places for People and Nature.
On-Site Solar For Your Business: Key Considerations and Funding Models
And as before, some interesting takeaways:
Different types of leadership are needed in different parts of the climate movement.
Climate messaging needs to be clear about what it is for, not just what it is against.
Greater use needs to made of geospatial data when it comes to planning EV charging infrastructure and the financing of that infrastructure, which also offers opportunities to develop new financial products.
The key to making sound financial decisions in an evolving situation like EV charging is balancing your planning priorities so that you stay just ahead of demand, i.e. giving customers what they want without overcommitting to a certain path that may turn out to be the wrong one.
There are grounds for optimism, particularly given the growing social demand for sustainability, which is translating into businesses taking action, no matter what government policy is doing.
Nature-based solutions are often more effective and beneficial in the long run, but they are slower to plan and implement because they are more complex.
For large projects, there is a trade-off between the need for innovation and the need for rigorous academic testing and evidence, but project partners with specialised expertise in the areas of innovation can be invaluable here.
Green infrastructure needs to be understood as key infrastructure, and this needs to be reflected in policy and implementation.
The management of green infrastructure needs to be a factor right from the planning and design stage - it is less effective and more time-consuming to ‘tack it on’ once it’s built.
Sustainability goals are most effective when they are also financially sustainable.
Net zero transition planning (RSK First Thursday Club)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRP3I0mXdUs
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay for the Q&A section of this session, but the presentation focused on some key issues and aspects to consider when coming up with a transition plan (and why businesses should be doing it). I think it’s fair to say it was a fairly introductory-level session, one which focused on the issues at a very high level, without going into too much detail. I am not the natural target audience for this sort of session, but I’m sure it was a very useful introduction for businesses that are just at the start of that planning process.
Climate Change and Gardening with Claire Mitchell, The Garden Editor (ITI SHEA network)
Only available to members of the SHEA network, this talk gave a summary of some key issues in gardening practices and how they contribute to climate change. These issues were grouped under the top-level topics of energy use, peat, plastic, water and plant choice. Some of the points covered will be familiar to anyone who watches Gardener’s World (I’m a huge fan, unsurprisingly), such as the impact of using peat, but some I was less familiar with, like the issues surrounding the production and transportation of perlite. Alongside the ‘do nots’, there will also plenty of useful tips for alternatives and suggestions for how we as consumers and gardeners can make a difference by tweaking the way we garden and what we buy to put in them.
Redefining Development Funding (Climate-KIC’s Open Dialogue)
Recording:
Regenerative farm management to reverse ecological decline (Institution of Environmental Science)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie-wBAM1veM
Don’t be fooled by the comparative shortness of the actual presentation, there’s huge amounts of information packed in here. Ian Davis does a really excellent job of working through some of the enormously complex systems involved in agriculture step-by-step, process-by-process. He shows how modern chemical-based intensive farming is causing enormous knock-on effects and, crucially, how this is not inevitable. On the contrary, we can reject the perverse incentives in these systems and replace our current high-input-high-output approaches with practices that are just as productive and also beneficial to the surrounding ecosystems.
Nature’s Calendar: is climate change altering autumn? (Woodland Trust)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2jxpkxZDK4
This one has actually been on my to-do list for a little while (since autumn, as the title implies!), but it was well worth the wait. The webinar was centred on the Woodland Trust’s Nature’s Calendar project, so it started with a summary of how the data is gathered before moving on to what sorts of conclusions can be drawn. A really interesting point was about to what extent annual variation affects the data and the project’s ability to identify trends, which reminded me of a quote from a speaker in the CPI’s series (below) on storytelling: “The plural of anecdote is not data.” The general trend, unsurprisingly, is that climate seems on the whole to be extending autumn, with fruiting starting early and leaf-fall coming later and later. This will have long-term consequences for the availability of food for wildlife etc. and may affect bird migration patterns in ways that we cannot yet entirely predict.
Annual General Meeting (Soil Association)
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjWd8CDx-hI
I am a member of the Soil Association, and I particularly use their price data as part of my ‘data-driven allotment’ series, so I was sad that the AGM clashed with another event, but fortunately it was recorded! The AGM covered the standard formalities like financial reporting, but the most interesting parts were about the association’s specific work and projects. These included the Consensus on Food, Farming and Nature, the Innovative Farmers programme, the new Soil Association Exchange and the Regenerative Forestry report. More general topics included agroforestry and the work the Association is doing with schools.
Translation skills
Revision club
A revision club is a peer-learning exercise where a small group of translators get together to sharpen our translation skills. This normally involves one person translating a document as practice and the others reviewing it for potential improvements. It can also take the form of a ‘slam’, where everybody in the group translates the same text and then compares versions.
Inspired by the season, this month’s revision club was all about inflation and its impact on the Christmas shopping season in France. Not necessarily the most cheery of topics, but some interesting insights into how people planned to restrict not so much the amount they spent as the number of presents by prioritising the presents that would mean the most or be the most useful. Perhaps an interesting insight into how we could take some of the materialism out of Christmas?
Centre for Public Impact’s series on storytelling
I suppose I might put these sessions under ‘communication skills’ or possibly ‘writing skills’, but I prefer to follow the ITI’s categories, and I will be deploying the skills in a translation context as well, of course!
Part 1: Exploring participatory storytelling in complex systems
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soRWYY2tmAw
It’s tricky to know how exactly to summarise such a wide-ranging session - a breadth that reflects just how many forms stories and storytelling take in society. The various case studies and talks covered interesting topics like the relationship between the fundamentally analogue process of storytelling and digital technologies like the internet, stories as tools of empowerment and empathy, and why decision-makers don’t make more systematic use of stories in their policy-making decisions and the implementation of them. One thing that did shine through was that each speaker seemed to have a slightly different understanding of what a story actually is, as mentioned in the concluding presentation about the work of the Centre for Public Impact (CPI), which is well worth a watch, even if you don’t have time for the whole session.
Part 2: The second branch: From storytelling to storylistening
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXM5rgoYCRc
This was a really fascinating discussion and well worth listening to. It covered a wide range of issues and perspectives, but the key takeaways could perhaps be summarised as: Stories and storytelling have incredible power to counteract the dominant governmental culture of over-simplification and efficiency, but they need to fall on fertile ground. In other words, the audience has to be prepared to actually listen and needs to have the trust of the storyteller, which can be a very time-consuming process to build. The relationship between data and story needs to be re-examined so that data is used to test a narrative, rather than data being the basis of the narrative. Not only is data almost always inherently flawed by the data-gatherers but it also tends to oversimplify and ignore gaps or discrepancies, meaning it does not truly reflect the story. Consequently any conclusions based on it will also be an oversimplification.