Last Saturday I provided translation services for Agrocenter Astana and China Investment Corporation. We met at the Beijing Palace, where the Chinese delegation stayed, and started driving away from Astana to visit the fields.

The discussion started while we were driving, CEO of CIC had a Chinese-Russian translator and I translated from Russian to English for the Head of Agrocenter Astana.

The discussion touched upon some agriculture issues and as I worked as an interpreter in agriculture sphere before, the vocabulary was familiar. Also I always prepare for translation by reading some materials on the topic and by making up my own glossary. Still there were some new words, such as fallow, GRS, multch. So my glossary never stops growing!

It took us about two hours to get to the fields, our guests from China were very surprised by the fact that one can drive for hours and hours in Kazakhstan and still see steppe and fields. Kazakhstan is a huge country, that’s for sure! When we finally reached our destination, we had a short  meeting there, then we also visited a silo and a place where Chinese agriculturists lived.

This trip was very interesting for me, since I like site visits. I’ve seen  tractors with ploughs where I was able to recognize plough bolts which were the subject of my translation for Unibolt company.  It was good to see what I was talking about last month 🙂