On June, 5-11 I provided interpreting services to Kyle James, a journalist from Deutsche Welle who came to Astana to conduct an in-house training for Radio Astana.

Interpreting services for Deutsche Welle in Astana

We worked closely with several journalists from that radio station, the training covered producing news blocks,  as well as feature programmes.
Kyle James gave some recommendations concerning the length of a programme, the music used under the text, the programme layout, etc. He worked with each journalist individually, so the training was very successful and interesting, too. We also worked with the journalist from the Kazakh department, so I did some English-Kazakh and Kazakh-English translation. Mr. James played some programmes that he produced himself, he also talked about different ways of presenting the information, how a reporter can use natural sounds  and by doing so  make listeners follow the reporter. It turned out that the European or American styles are quite different from the one that people are used to here. Eventhough not everything of what was said could be applied to Kazakhstan, the journalists  would like to try to produce their programmes in a new way. They were genuinely interested in the training,they raised a lot of questions and asked for some advice. Also before leaving Mr. James wrote down some guidelines which I translated from English to Russian, these guidelines can help a reporter make his/her story more dynamic and thrilling.
According to what they say, the journalists have learned many things.  Me too, I’ve learned a lot in terms of radio journalism and in terms of new words, such as vox pop for example. Mr. James has left already but every now and then I put on the Radio Astana and listen to some feature programmes which have slightly changed because of the training 🙂