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Simultaneous translation in Aktau for the Ministry of Environment Protection

August 24th, 2011

I just came back to Kazakhstan from my trip to Europe and on the same day I left for Aktau, a city on the Caspian Sea, to provide simultaneous translation services to the Ministry of the Environment Protection of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Conference of the Parties to the framework convention of the marine environment of the Caspian Sea was held in Aktau with the participation of all the Caspian littoral countries: Azerbaijan, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kazakhstan, Russian Federation, Turkmenistan and UN Secretariat.

On the first two days there was discussion at the level of experts and working groups that touched upon protocols to be signed by the Ministers of Environment Protection of the five countries. Discussion were hot and lasted till midnight or even longer. But it was worth it: by the end of the third day the Ministers signed a protocol which from now on will be called the Aktau Protocol. This is the first protocol that was singed over the last eight years of work so everybody who participated at the Conference was very proud of this accomplishment.

After the signature of the Protocol there was another meeting between the Mayor of Mangystau oblast’ (which is where Aktau is situated) and the UN representative in Kazakhstan. I was asked to consecutively interpret during this meeting. The meeting was short but fruitful and its outcome is that there is a possibility for cooperation between the UN agencies in Kazakhstan and the region.

English Interpreter for INNO Group Seminar

April 10th, 2011

Recently I came back to Astana from a business trip to the regions of Kazakhstan. National Innovation Fund of the Republic of Kazakhstan organized a seminar that was held in all the cities of the country to which I was invited as an English interpreter for the experts from INNO Group (Sweden).

English Interpreter  for seminar

First seminar was held in Karaganda and was followed by a number of seminars in Aktau, Atyrau, Kostanay,Uralsk, etc. In 8 days we covered 7 cities which meant one flight a day.

The seminar touched upon issues like transfer of technology, licencing, patenting, intellectual property and the like. Target group of the seminar was university professors and scientists who come up with inventions and should know how to introduce these inventions to the market and how to protect their intellectual property.

INNO Group is a German company with offices all over Europe that has a 20+ years of experience in the field of transfer of technology. The whole concept is quite new in Kazakhstan, that is why it was very important to listen to the experts and to participate in the seminar. INNO Group experts, Mr. Biorkman and Mr. Grankvist, in the course of the seminar among other things aslso had a couple of case studies which made the seminar very interactive and dynamic.

We were warmly welcomed in every city and every university, we visited a laboratory in Kostanay where we we shown the latest inventions of the university scientists. All in all it was a very nice and interesting trip, I have definitely learned a lot about innovations and transfer of technology, business incubators and copy rights, business angels and validity of patents. There is another series of seminars planned, so I hope that my list of newly acquired  knowledge will be even longer!

Russian interpreter for Deutsche Welle in Aktau

October 25th, 2010

Not much time passed since I worked as an interpreter for Deutsche Welle in Karaganda and I am already on my way to Aktau (a city by Caspean Sea) to perform English-Russian translation of the technical workshop again.

English-russian interpreter Deutsche Welle Aktau

The workshop was conducted by Marc Seidel at the „West“ radion station mostly for the sound engineers and DJs. Journalists and news readers were also willing to participate, so Marc tried to „make everybody happy“ and cover as many topics as possible.

The radio station is quite new, so most of the staff is young, energetic and excited about learning new things. First we had quite a technical introduction including the digitalization of the sound, bitrate impact on sound quality, sampling frequency, MP3 etc. Then we had more practice: participants learned about different types of microphones, they got to work with the digital recorder, they even produced a story by using various ambient sounds and also they did a vox pop by recording different people’s answers to the same question. They also dealt with some post-production software which seemed to be a lot of fun for the participants.

The newsreaders also had a chance to benefit from a workshop: on the last day of the seminar we did some exercises in order to train newsreaders to select the most important items for the news and to present the news in a professional way.

The participants and the management of the radio station were so friendly and so genuinely interested in the workshop that it was a real pleasure to work with these people. Our week long seminar is finished and they  have already requested for more seminars in the future, so I guess it was not the last trip to the Caspean Sea!