Translator Astana

On October, 3-5 I was in Karaganda and provided interpreter services in the regional cardio surgery center where Siemens experts held a training for doctors – cardio surgeons. Two days before the assignment I was given a 720 pages book where I found terms like ECG waveform, ablation, hemodynamics, NBP (non-invasive blood pressure), and others.

First day started at 6am when I met with Siemens experts who would be conducting the training and we started our 3 hours car drive to Karaganda. At 9 am we entered the cardio center and met doctors, all of us were given gowns and shoe covers which was a reason for some laughs and we started our training. Our main focus is the equipment for electrophysiological studies, a so-called Sensis. Doctors in the center have worked with the equipment for a year so they were more than just familiar with it, still they had some questions and problems to be solved. Which is exactly what we came here for.

Once I got my head around all the curves and leads that exist in EP – electrophysiology, I felt much better then when I first heard about the upcoming translation- a mix of medical and technical translation, which is quite something, I should tell. But… it’s never time to relax because next day it turned out I would be interpreting during the operation. ‘’Oh my god!”, I said to myself and “yes, no problem” – to the experts. I’ve been in different places because of my job but never in the operation room where –what a surprise!- a person is being operated on.

First come the nurses, they prepare a patient for the operation, next one is the anesthesiologist, then the doctor, then us. Operation starts and lasts for more than 2 hours. I will skip the details but the main goal of the operation is to introduce catheters into the patient’s heart, to find a part of the tissue that instead of being an isolator conducts heart’s signals and to burn- “ablade” that part. By the end of those 2 hours everybody is tired but –just like in a movie- the surgeon is smiling and saying “Operation was successful”, then we all smile and go for a coffee. The training goes on.

Next day was the last day of the training and I am already on my way back home because my next assignment awaits me in Astana on the following day. It was a really good trip, I learned a lot and met nice people and now I am looking forward to the next training which hopefully will take place in Astana in December.

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).

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!

For a week I did English-Russian translation of a technical workshop in Karaganda, I worked together with Marc Seidel, a trainer from Deutsche Welle Academy.

I have already worked  as an interpreter for Deutsche Welle before, but last time it was a journalistic workshop. This time it was a workshop for technicians and sound engineers of the radio station TEX, its aim was to improve sound quality and to make people at the radio station aware of any problem that may occur on an every day basis.

Since it was a technical seminar, the words that I dealt with were also quite technical, such as transmitter, sampling frequency, bitrate, data reduction etc. We talked about how analogue sounds become digital ones, how they are then transmitted and broadcasted. Stereo and mono sounds were also discussed, as well as the difference between stereo sounds and two-channel sounds.

Mr.Seidel  also had some music items with different problems, for example in one item low frequencies were missing, in another one there were not enough teble. For the participants it was very interesing to find out the problem and its reason. Thus they trained their ears to immediately recognize the problems. We also went to the antenna where the transmitter was located to check if everything was fine with it and if there was anything wrong with the settings.
The atmosphere of the workshop was very nice, participants felt free to ask any questions, so the workshop was quite interactive and everyone seemed to be happy to learn something new.

In May I worked as English-Russian translator in Moscow and other Russian cities together with Mr.Vinther, the regional manager of Unibolt company. We already worked with Mr.Vinther in March when he attended the Agritek exhibition in Astana, so I was familiar with the subject matter, that was the reason why he asked me to fly with him to Moscow.

It was a very hectic trip, our schedule was extremely tight: we had 11 flights within 10 days. Mr. Vinther flew from Danemark and I flew from Astana, we met in Moscow and had several meetings there. We visited a couple of companies involved in agriculture sector and we took our first steps in establishing a business partnership. Then we flew to another Russian city called Samara, where we had a similar meeting. After that we also flew to Rostov-on-Don and Volgograd. Unfortunately there are no direct flights between these cities, so every time we had to come back to Moscow. And there was no time for sightseeing!

Since Unibolt, the company that Mr. Vinther presented, is a manufacture of bolts, our meetings were quite technical, so it was handy to know different types of the bolts, such as wheel bolts, clevis pins, etc. At the same time our meetings touched upon some financial issues, because we met with Directors or Sales Managers as well.

I must say that Russia is very different from Kazakhstan, eventhough these countries have a lot in common. Moscow itself is a crazy city, ecpecially in terms of security. Each time we had to fly to/from Moscow we had to pass security control which would have been fine if we hadn’t have to take our shoes off all the time 🙂 Also they asked us several times about visa, migration card, registration and all these issues.

When our trip to Russia was over, we flew to Astana only to spend here less than 24 hours. Our next destination was Karaganda, it was the first time that I worked as a translator in Karaganda. We had several meeting in the city, then flew to Almaty and worked for a couple of days there.

This was quite a trip, but the good thing is Mr. Vinther is coming back to Kazakhstan in July which means the trip was rather successful!

Figures speaking:

• 10 days
• 11 flights
• 7 cities
• 2 countries
• 18 meetings
• 9 airports
• 25 hours on the planes
• 0 crashes 🙂