CPD Roundup: January 2024
Welcome to January’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.
Subject knowledge
EA Sustain
This weekend-long event, hosted at Firstsite in Colchester, formed the centrepiece of my CPD for this month. I found it hugely inspiring, so much so that I have made the unusual decision to write about each session individually. These are, of course, only my personal impressions of what stood out to me rather that complete summaries – the sessions were recorded and will, presumably, be available online soon enough.
Green Icon: Caroline Lucas
What could I possibly say about Caroline Lucas that hasn’t been said before? She was, unsurprisingly, an eloquent and passionate speaker with both an encyclopaedic knowledge of the issues and an ability to tease out the connections between them. Equally unsurprisingly, her comments broadly echoed the central message that she delivered at the Soil Association’s Peter Melchett Memorial Lecture (see November 2023’s CPD roundup), namely that we need to reimagine our politics to be truly inclusive and collaborative if we are going to overcome the challenges in front of us. She also emphasised the need for truly intergenerational thinking, to ensure that the decisions we make span the full range of issues, age groups and parliamentary terms.
Murky Waters
Do you remember the time before river pollution was something that made the evening news? I certainly do, and I still instinctively feel like sewage being dumped into our rivers is a recent issue that came out of nowhere. This is, as this session laid out, far from the case – the crisis in river-water quality in the UK has been building up over years, driven by the triple-headed dragon of privatisation (and the resulting decades of underinvestment in infrastructure), agricultural intensification (and the slurry run-offs this produces) and deregulation. Or rather, as the speakers made clear, not so much deregulation as the defunding of the regulatory bodies whose role is enforce the regulations. Privatisation now seems essentially irreversible, and changes are happening in the agricultural sector, if slowly, but regulation seems like the lowest-hanging fruit. The speakers argued that it would take a comparatively small amount of money to re-fang the enforcement agencies (certainly compared to the costs of fixing future damage), but whether that will happen is, of course, a political issue.
"One Midsummer's Day"
Interconnectedness was one of the key themes of the entire weekend, but nowhere was it more prominent than in this session. Mark Cocker’s emphasis on symbiosis and partnership was really refreshing, as was his critique of the usefulness of beauty as a measure of an environment’s value. Beauty, he argued, is essentially a human construct. Scrub is not beautiful, but it is complex and diverse, and alive in ways that neatly clipped Capability-Brown-style avenues of trees in manor-house gardens can’t compare to. This is partly recognised in how Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty have now been rebranded as National Landscapes. Whilst imperfect, this change is perhaps one step towards shedding some of the filters through which we see the natural world, bringing us back to an understanding of the human creature as part of nature, not apart from it.
Landscape recovery, a joined up approach
This was a fascinating talk on the work of farm clusters – a concept I hadn’t personally heard of. These are geographically connected groups of farms that have decided to come together to plan collaborative cross-site projects intended to enhance biodiversity across entire regions. There are obviously huge scaling-up benefits that come from this kind of collaboration, but there are also practical benefits, like being able to access ELMS funding. There were a few different farm clusters represented, but given my loyalties, I took a particular interest in the North Essex Farm Cluster (who focus primarily on the Blackwater catchment area) and their pilot project to create natural connections between farms within the Pant Valley.
Reframing Education
I’ll be honest, it would never have occurred to me that the most effective way of improving the integration of nature into the curriculum was simply to create a new GCSE devoted to it. But I’m glad someone else came up with the idea! Every job will be a green job, we keep being told, but this is the first time I’ve heard of an attempt to systemically integrate that as a principle into the formal school curriculum. There are, of course, challenges, but I really applaud the course designers’ efforts to create a truly interdisciplinary and cross-curricular programme that emphasises the importance of understanding your local environment and working together collaborative.
Glocal Hero: William Kendall
“Everyone’s passionate these days,” quipped William Kendall at the start of this session. I suppose that’s true, but not everyone puts it into practice the way he does. It was a fascinating life-story, but I suppose the key takeaway is that sometimes it’s important to just dive in and start doing, and that doing something imperfectly is better than doing nothing at all. Another really interesting point, I think, is that shifting from what he called “chemical farming” to more organic ways of operating is not only beneficial for the planet, but also for the farmers’ sense of pride and esteem. This is something that can get lost in the debate around intensive agriculture – it’s not that farmers are indifferent to the damage caused by modern farming methods, it’s just that we’ve reached the point where “that’s just the way it’s done”, i.e. being stuck in a certain way of thinking. Whilst the transition may seem challenging, the alternatives are ultimately a much greater source of creativity and pride in their work, and we neglect that at our peril.
“Wishcycling” - a panel discussion about recycling
I was dreading this session a little. I diligently wash and separate my recycling whenever I can (a habit I picked up whilst living in Austria and will likely never lose), but I’ve always been aware that what happens to that recycling next was one of those ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problems. To an extent, however, it was reassuring to know that it’s not entirely my fault. The UK has suffered from an incredible lack of consistency in how our waste is handled – a fragmentation that causes huge inefficiency and dissuades business from investing in larger-scale solutions. A number of solutions were proposed, partly focusing on the need for consistency in handling the packaging, but also in the way it is designed in the first place – for example, only using a single polymer in a piece of packaging massively simplifies the recycling process for that packaging. The introduction of extended producer responsibility was also discussed, which recognises the fact that too much emphasis is placed on the consumer in this area, and not enough on the manufacturers. That said, there are also some examples of businesses stepping up and taking the lead in this area, like DS Smith, who were also represented on the panel.
Master Lens: Mattias Klum / “See Nature, rejoicing, has shown us the way” - a concert by Stevie Wishart
These were both fascinating sessions, but they were primarily visual/audio in nature, and I couldn’t do justice to the level of skill and artistry displayed, so I can only encourage you to watch the recordings when they become available.
Green Icon: Helen Browning
Much like Caroline Lucas, Helen Browning is such a legend that I’m not sure I could say anything that hasn’t been said before. In some ways, Helen’s comments echoed what William Kendall had said about the importance of passion and pride in farming. One thing that really connected with me was her point that farming is relatively straightforward, getting the stuff sold afterwards is the hard bit. We have a similar problem in the translation profession – AI and other technologies are ‘standardising’ the translation process just as industrial agriculture has standardised the farming process, and with similarly negative consequences for the consumers of both. Both farmers and translators need to re-learn how to ‘sell’ what they do, and to emphasise the benefits of human-scale production over more mechanised methods. Hopefully both organic food and ‘organic’ translation will soon become the norm, rather than expensive luxuries only available to the wealthy. The relatively short sessions covered a huge range of issues and questions, and it’s well worth a watch.
Rewilding Dogger Bank - a panel discussion presented by Blue Marine Foundation and EA Sustain
It won’t come as a surprise that I thought, and still think, Brexit was fundamentally a bad idea, but there have been some interesting knock-on effects. One is Britain’s exit from the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. This opened the door to the British government being sued for its failure to enforce Marine Protected Areas, one of the projects that the Blue Marine Foundation is working on. The discussion covered a wide range of issues – the more obvious ecological benefits of protecting and rewilding Dogger Bank and the thorny legal issues of how the Dogger Bank is controlled and managed by multiple nations, some in the EU and some not, but also other questions I hadn’t thought about, like the archaeological significance of Dogger Bank, and the lack of resources that have been committed to really investigating it.
The Elephant in the Room
Arguably the most controversial of all the weekend’s sessions, this talk was about population sizes, or rather the declining birth rates in the Global North, and what these might mean for the future of our economies and societies. I would argue that the controversy stems not so much from the conclusions that either “side” of the debate comes to, and more from the fact that the argument conflates two separate issues. It is a problem that individual Western nation’s birth rates are declining at such a pace that their productivities and therefore standards of living are at risk. It is also a problem that the global population is growing at such a rate that there are serious concerns about the Earth’s ability to feed all of us. These statements are not mutually exclusive, and a truly smart solution would be one that stabilised both individual nations’ populations and the global population. For me, that is the true elephant in the room.
Stockfree Organic Farming with Iain Tolhurst
Iain “Tolly” Tolhurst is a legend in the organic farming movement, but I had never actually heard him speak. In many ways, what he had to say should not really be that surprising. He manages a thriving farm that produces huge quantities of food and keeps a significant number of people in fairly paid employment, doing so without animal manures by mimicking the natural patterns he seems around him. This shouldn’t be a shock – the fact that the productivity of this kind of farming method needs to be emphasised is perhaps the best proof that we as a culture have absorbed the idea that organic farming is less productive than industrial farming. There were a huge number of takeaways, but I think the central message was that you have to look at the land in front of you and see what works there and what doesn’t, then work with the system that nature gives you, rather than trying to impose an artificial one on it. It’s an attitude shift embodied in a something Iain said about his attitude to producing food that I will never forget: “We grow plants, some of them we can eat.”
The Future of Food
If you’re a regular reader of my blog (what do you mean you aren’t?), you might remember I gave my two cents on the masterpiece The Wizard and the Prophet a couple of months ago. As a brief reminder, the central argument is that there are two key ways of thinking about the future of our planet: wizards think that science and technology hold the solutions to our environmental challenges, whereas prophets believe that the only solution is massive system change that involves scaling back our consumption as a species and learning from ‘the old ways’ and their lower impacts. I have never seen a clearer illustration of the difference between the two than the difference between the ‘prophecy’ of Iain Tolhurst’s discussion of organic farming and the ‘wizardry’ of gene-edited crops, vertical farming and synthetic meat presented in this session. I find this area all very interesting in theory, but I am by inclination more of a prophet than a wizard, so I remain not wholly convinced. The reality, of course, is that our future probably depends on a combination of the two – there are huge challenges ahead, and we are going to need every tool in the toolbox to confront them.
The Leading Edge of Sustainable Fashion
Given my interest in textiles and how they are produced, it probably sounds strange for me to say that I’m not actively interested in fashion (I can practically hear Miranda Priestley lowering her spectacles to peer at me as I type). I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I’m not particularly interested in luxury fashion – functionality is usually more of a priority for me than style. Fortunately, there was some really interesting discussion about functionality in this session. In particular, I found the idea of reconnecting with the source of leather and the challenges of tracing the processes back through the entire supply chain really fascinating. And as a fan of what are sometimes called ‘heritage’ skills, it was also great to hear about the long-honed skills of the craftspeople of the Royal Mint being put to new, innovative uses.
Radical Rethink / Art & Environment
It’s probably a bit of an oversimplification to combine these two sessions into one summary, but in some ways, the second session continued the conversation of the first session. In the first, Director Emerita of Tate Modern Frances Morris posed some intriguing questions about what the future of museums should look like – is there too much of an emphasis on collecting and big ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions that will elicit a certain predictable response from the public? For me, the most challenging question was around the ecological cost of storing all the artwork in pristine condition. Perhaps, Frances suggested, the time has come to acknowledge that all artworks have a certain lifespan, that they are not immortal and should be allowed to naturally fade and pass, rather than being held pristine but unseen in perpetuity. Perhaps this would free up some of the funding that goes into buying and maintaining the collections to improve the visitor experience. This was a particularly interesting question given that the event was being hosted at the Firstsite gallery in Colchester, which does not have a permanent collection, partly for these reasons. And perhaps it would also reduce large museums’ reliance on money from sources with less-than-stellar ecological credentials. The second session focused more on non-institutional actors in the art scene – i.e. the individual artists themselves and the role they can play in influencing institutions, particularly in terms of movements like Culture Declares Emergency. The emphasis was on grassroots, bottom-up collaboration and the power of these sorts of movements to effect change.
Both were really interesting, uplifting, and slightly unexpected, sessions to end the weekend with.
Wilderness & Wild Places
Hosted by the Chelmsford local group of the Essex Wildlife Trust, this session presented the work of the Wilderness Foundation. The foundation aims to “help young people and adults reconnect to society and themselves through outdoor facilitation adventures, therapy and mentoring”, which they do through a variety of programmes and activities aimed at different ages groups. What I think came across most clearly in the talk is that actively engaging with the natural world is beneficial in all sorts of ways that directly counteract some of the negative effects of the way we life today.
Translation skills
What every translator and interpreter should know about AI part 1
This was a wide-ranging session that set out some definitions and identified some of the benefits and limits of artificial intelligence (AI), neural machine translation (NMT), large language models (LLMs) and various other terms. If you’ve read the FAQ section of my website, you may know that I don’t actively offer any of these services to direct clients. That’s not to say I don’t use them at all, it’s just that these tools belong to the toolbox of a section of the market that I am becoming less and less comfortable with. That’s partly because of how these tools overpromise and increase end users’ expectations in a way that puts unrealistic pressure on translators, but it’s more because of the level of risk involved. Risk was a key theme in this webinar, not just in terms of the reliability of the tools, but also in terms of the potential threats that these tools pose to translators – partly to our income (but there’s ways round that), but more importantly to the values that we strive for as professional linguists.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make part 2 live, but it was recorded, so I will be catching up on that in February!
The ecological impact of neural machine translation
It won’t come as a surprise that this session really combined two of my major interests. Like all highly automated processes, neural machine translation (like the services offered by DeepL, Google Translate etc) is heavily reliant on data-crunching, which requires vast amounts of electricity to run, which in turn has to be fuelled by something. And given the way our power grids run right now, that produces significant amounts of CO2e. How much is a challenging thing to calculate, of course.
NMT’s energy consumption is not the only issue – we could switch to renewable energy, but there are other costs involved there (e.g. blocking fish migrations to build hydroelectric dams). The data centres where these services are hosted require significant amounts of rare minerals to construct, and they consume vast amounts of water as coolant, often to the detriment of local wildlife and communities. And of course, these ecological impacts are often being imposed in areas that will not benefit from the services that these data centres provide. This was the key point that the speaker, Matt Riemland, made so effectively – like so many of the things that the Global North relies on, the actual impacts are being felt primarily in Global South countries. So, there is an ecological imperative, but it is increasingly tied up with a moral one as well.
One thing that the session didn’t cover, and I imagine would be extraordinarily difficult to tease out, is comparing the ecological cost of using neural machine translation to that of a human translator doing the same work. We are so dependent on the internet for our work, and that has an ecological cost as well. What exactly we can do about that remains an incredibly thorny issue, of course.
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.
It was my turn to choose a text this month, and I picked the impact report of a French campaigning organisation. The challenging thing about this text was not so much translating the content accurately but rather getting the tone right. Just how critical of the government and the EU should the translation sound? How biting should the rhetoric be, or how restrained? These are the sorts of issues that translators can have great fun with during practice exercises like this but that can be really challenging in real translations. It was, in short, the sort of text that should not be translated by a machine but instead entrusted to a reliable human translator. These sorts of translations are exactly where humans have the edge – when how something is said is as important as what is said.