Impressions from KCI contributors

Elisabet Tiselius - Director of Studies for Interpreting at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies (TÖI), Stockholm University                                                          

The new Knowledge Centre on Interpretation (KCI) of DG Interpretation offers many potential networking, training and development opportunities for students, interpreters, interpreter trainers and interpreter researchers. Similar to other knowledge centres, the KCI has the ambition to be a one-stop-shop for everything on interpreting. As an interpreter trainer and researcher, I have high hopes that this will become an invaluable resource for me as a trainer, where I will be able to exchange ideas and best practices about interpreter training of all kinds with my colleagues all over the globe. For my students, I hope that the centre will offer even more material for training, than SCIC itself does today with resources such as SCICtrain and Speech Repository (and that is not a small challengeJ). The beauty of KCI is that as trainers, for instance, we can all contribute to the resources and create a vast repository of training material for our students.

In interpreting research, we often hear that one must bridge the gap between research and practice. Although, I’m not sure the gap is that big, I appreciate an opportunity for me as a researcher to share my findings with the interpreter community. The EU has funded so many good projects on interpreting, AVIDICUS and SHIFT just to mention two. With the KCI, these projects can be displayed where anyone curious about interpreting will be able to find these projects and many, many others.

Also, the fact that the KCI encompasses all types of interpreting is a strength. Research, training and the actual practice have more similarities than differences. As the interpreting profession continues its road towards professionalization this will be a great tool to collect resources and exchange experiences between all groups of interpreters, interpreting teachers/students and researchers. Let’s also hope that we can get the users of interpreting on-board as we are nothing without them.

Alexander Drechsel - Conference interpreter, blogger, sub-editor for the Innovation pillar

DG Interpretation is no stranger to technology-related projects: just look at SCICtrain, Virtual Classes or the Speech Repository. The Knowledge Centre for Interpretation is the latest addition, and I’m very excited about it. Why? Because it will put the existing SCIC initiatives under one umbrella AND take it all to the next level by adding collaborative features. The KCI could become the one platform that the interpreting community has been waiting for.

Sure, there are many such groups out there, but all of them live on privately-owned social networks that are more interested in “driving engagement” and selling ads than on meaningful conversations. SCIC is probably best-placed to create a platform that finally brings together all parts of our community across settings, modes and spoken and signed languages. A platform that serves, and showcases, the entire community - that’s what I am excited about.

I’ve had the pleasure to kick the KCI tyres and provide some feedback during the testing phase. It has made great progress in the capable hands of Cathy Pearson, Javier Hernandez Saseta and their team. And I already know what I want to use the platform for, once it opens to the wider public. For a while, I’ve helped run a technology-focussed discussion group for interpreters on Facebook. Personally, I’ve never been really comfortable with the network and recent news haven‘t exactly been comforting, so I cannot wait to start a technology-focused group on the KCI, exploring various topics like mobile devices or automated terminology extraction with colleagues.