What’s the greatest invention since sliced bread? For many linguists, stuck at home during the current pandemic and far from the opportunities on offer in London, the answer would be high-quality, interactive and easily available CPD sessions that can be enjoyed from the comfort of our own homes. This quickly sold-out event, the first of its kind to be organised by the NWTN, was delivered by Dr Rebecca Tipton and brought together colleagues not only from the UK but from across Europe.
Focusing mostly on public service interpreting, Dr Tipton demonstrated several useful live note-taking skills using two speeches from the EU’s Speech Repository tool (an excellent free source of materials for practice). She demonstrated a number of techniques, such as adding a margin to the page and using a mixture of codes and symbols to create notes, and revisited Rozan’s seven principles (noting the idea, using abbreviations etc.). By sharing her live notes, Dr Tipton really brought these rather dry theoretical concepts to life. We also had a chance to brush up our note-taking skills by getting our teeth into two carefully chosen speeches – one written for use as a learning resource, and the other a real speech delivered in the European Parliament.
All this was supplemented with recommendations for further reading: the well-known book ‘Note-Taking for Consecutive Interpreting’ by Andrew Gillies and ‘Interpretation Techniques and Exercises’ by James Nolan – both of which will be mainly of interest to conference interpreters – and Kirsty Heimerl-Moggan’s ‘Note-taking for Public Service Interpreters’, a very readable and practical guide focusing mainly on PSI.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable session, with instruction kept to a bare minimum to allow plenty of time for us to practise our skills and reflect in small groups. I hope that this is just the first of many more events of this kind.
By Agnieszka M. Kwiecien BA DPSI NRPSI MCIOL CL
