Translator Astana

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.

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!

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.