Chartered Institute
of Linguists
NEWS & VOICES
Historically, and for standard use, language has been expressed as four language ‘skills’ which are, alphabetically, Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing. More frequently, Government and universities in the UK and internationally order the four skills by the passive/receptive, active/productive pairings of Listening and Speaking, Reading and Writing....
It’s an age-old question. Well maybe not age-old actually, but it has been a question since at least 1954, when the authors of a Georgetown–IBM Machine Translation demo – with an IBM701 mainframe computer, using a rules-based system and an operator punching Romanised Russian sentences onto cards – confidently predicted that Machine Translation (MT) would be solved within the...
Some of the work done by the Institute of Fiscal Studies on the impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings makes for sobering reading for linguists. Their report from a couple of years ago, for instance, suggested that the discounted average lifetime total returns for women in arts and humanities subjects such as creative arts, languages, and philosophy were negative or near-...
Amazingly that is a question we get asked a lot. Our answer is of course – yes! We are often surprised that a mentor would even question their value just because they are retired. The sad fact is that retirement means that for many organisations and professions a wealth of knowledge and experience walks out of the door along with the retiree.
This of course needn’t be the case;...
Deciding to take Diploma in Public Service Interpreting (DPSI) exams was one of the most important decisions I have ever made in my life.
Back in 2014, I held a Level-3 Community Interpreting Qualification and I thought it was alright. I enjoyed working for hospitals, schools, and social services although it never really was a full-time job. I, like many newbies in the...
Our divisions, societies and networks are run by members, for members, and offer a unique opportunity for language practitioners to come together to network, share ideas, offer support and guidance. Three of our groups; the Interpreting Division, the Business, Professions and Government Division and the Scottish Society are looking for volunteers to join their steering groups. You can be part...
One of the great tools that you can access is our mentoring program.
What is mentoring?
The primary role of a mentor is to use the experience and knowledge they have gained in their career to help guide a mentee towards their future career ambitions.
A good mentor should be unconnected with a mentee’s day-to-day work, in order to provide objectivity and a bring a focus on...
I’m delighted to have the opportunity to meet with a group of such distinguished linguists and managers of highly specialised language services. I am a languages graduate myself and call myself a linguist, but I am acutely aware that my skills are very amateur indeed compared to yours, despite some decades ago actually having worked and volunteered as an interpreter now and again....
By Mike Routledge
Preparing for the DipTrans exam requires reflection and practice. Reflection means considering what the exam is testing: the production of a target text that is:
We are delighted to announce our new free to use Video Chat feature that is now inbuilt into our mentoring platform. So, if you enjoy doing your mentoring meetings remotely you can now arrange and conduct them using the mentoring platform, without the need to have a Zoom, Teams etc. account.
The platform now has a Meet/video tool which can be used to arrange meetings and to record and...