CPD roundup: January 2025
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
Oxford Real Farming Conference
Recording: Only available to delegates
How to sum up the Oxford Real Farming Conference in a few sentences? It only lasts for two days, but it feels like you’ve absorbed weeks of knowledge in that time. I suppose another way of saying that is that it’s an intense experience. But it’s also an incredibly joyful one, and one that has sparked off all sorts of trains of thought about what the translation profession can learn from regenerative and sustainable farmers. I am still working my way through these ideas and trying to put them into a sensible order that I can share. But in the meantime, here are all the sessions I was lucky enough to attend. As usual, I haven’t written each one up in detail, but I will say that a real highlight for me was the wool skills sharing workshop, where I was able to demonstrate some spinning skills and inspire at least one person to give it a go themselves!
Opening plenary - a fantastic and uplifting way to kick off the conference, featuring performances of traditional and new songs, and short addresses from leaders within the movement.
Farming Today for Tomorrow’s Climate: Practical Global Solutions - regenerative and organic farmers from around the world talking about their projects.
Remembering to Use Our hands to Make Things - more of a meditation than a convention presentation, all about the continuing (and increasing) importance of doing things by hand in an increasingly digital world.
Economics of Sustainable Horticulture: Can it Be Profitable? - what it says on the tin! I enjoyed this one in particular because it gave me a glimpse into the world of the kind of clients I really value.
Community, Food, Land, Nature; Local and Global Perspectives - at its core, this talk was about land sovereignty and the place and responsibility of growing food within that, from local allotments to railway-side projects to large farms.
Tipping Points: Folk Music Performance and Talk - as someone who thinks a lot about how to communicate within the environmental/sustainability field, I found the mixed media approach (combining videos and animations with live music) of this talk really effective and moving.
Working with Wool workshop: Demonstration and Skill Sharing - well, how could I refuse when the call went out for volunteers to take part in demonstrating wool skills!
Homegrown Fashion: The British Fibres Regenerating Landscapes and Creativity – following straight on from the wool workshop, this was a really nice complement, showcasing projects that are slightly larger than homespun and dyed wool, but definitely still well below the megacorp scale.
Rewilding the Mind: Connecting to the Lore of the Land - an interesting discussion on surprising similarities between the folklores of seemingly unconnected cultures.
Closing plenary - And of course, it all ended with some inspiring addresses and – what else – a singalong!
This is probably not the last time I’ll be writing about this conference – not least because there are a load of recordings that I need to catch up on. One of the disadvantages of there being so much to absorb is that you can only be in one place at a time!
Essex Rock – Geology Beneath the Landscape (Essex Wildlife Trust Chelmsford local group)
Recording: not recorded
To be honest, this talk took me a bit outside my comfort zone – geology is not something I’ve ever really engaged with in depth since GCSE Geography. But it was really interesting, particularly in terms of seeing into deep time, both the past and the potential future. One thing the speaker said a few times was “where the North Sea is at the moment”, and it was the “at the moment” part that really jarred in my mind, highlighting that the way the world is laid out is really, if you take the long view, only temporary. I also now know why all the hills and raised areas in Essex are in the northern part of the county!
Wetland Creation (Scalgo)
Recording: https://scalgo.com/en-US/webinars/wetland-creation
This was quite a technical webinar – the kind of thing I love to attend in order to really understand how the people I work for are thinking. It was a webinar of two halves, the first demonstrating the platform Scalgo Live, which is a high-resolution terrain model available for various countries that can be used to plan interventions and model what that might do to the landscape – in this case, how creating interventions to slow water flow and create wetlands will affect things like flow speed within and beyond the intervention area. The second half was then a practical demonstration, using the example of creating a wetland on a farm to minimise the risk of flooding.
Panel Discussion on Technology and the Environment (Institution of Environmental Sciences)
Recording: not yet available, but will be published on the IES YouTube channel in due course
I found this session really interesting for two reasons: firstly, because it’s fascinating to hear about technological developments and how they can be used in really practical ways in any event. And secondly, because a lot of the discussion around reliability, accuracy and the role of technology in the decision-making process sounded eerily similar to the conversations taking place within Translationland. Interestingly, the relationship between technology and decision-makers seems to be much more clearly defined in this context, so there’s something to learn from that, I think!
Auf dem Weg zu Netto-Null: Die Rolle österreichischer Wälder (Glacier)
(On the Road to Net Zero: The Role of Austria’s Forests)
Recording: https://glacier.eco/resources/webinar-auf-dem-weg-zu-netto-null
Part of my ongoing commitment to absorbing subject knowledge in the languages I translate from as well as English, This was a really interesting webinar about Tree.ly, a company committed to protecting Europe’s forests (in this case, particularly in Austria) through selling carbon-offset credits. The speaker addressed the issues with carbon credits head-on and explained why their approach (focusing on local, traceable, auditable projects and only issuing credits for a year at a time, based on an annual assessment of the ongoing benefits of the projects) helps to remedy some of those issues. This sounds like the way forward to me.
RE2020 : anticipez les prochaines exigences à venir (Apave)
(2020 Environmental Regulation: Preparing for the Upcoming Requirements)
Recording: https://app.livestorm.co/apave/re2020-anticipez-les-prochaines-exigences-a-venir/live
This was quite a technical webinar about how building sustainability requirements are changing in France as a result of the 2020 Environmental Regulation. The regulation sets requirements in three areas; energy efficiency, carbon impact and something called “Summer comfort” (confort d'été), which has to do with how habitable buildings are during the hot periods over Summer. There are various indicators attached to each of these pillars, and the speakers discussed the challenges of adapting to the new requirements, drawing on some interesting case studies.
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.
This month’s revision club piece was a reflective one commemorating 10 years since the 2015 attacks by religious extremists that took place across France. Obviously a challenging subject to engage with – and one where striking the exact right tone is difficult. This was all the more true in this case as the overall tone of the piece was very “French” – it used a fair number of rhetorical devices that are less accepted in typical English discourse. Public discourse in France continues to be more “rhetorical” than English, and translating this sort of material literally, or sticking too close to the original text, can lead to the translation seeming somewhat contrived or forced to an English-speaking reader accustomed to a more “everyday” style of public discourse – even if this approach is just as deliberate and studied as its French equivalent.