Translator Astana

On April, 23-24^th I worked as a simultaneous English-Russian and Russian –English translator at the 5^th Roadmap meeting on Foot-and-Mouth decease in Western Eurasia.

The meeting was organized jontly by the Ministry of Agriculture of Kazakhstan and OIE – World organization for animal health. Representatives of over 15 countries came to the meeting: Kazakhstan, Russian, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Turkey, Armenia and others; each of the country delivered a report on FMD situation in the respected countries.

Issues such as vaccination, decease control, prevention measures, monitoring and others were discussed. The meeting was quite technical; representatives of the World Reference Laboratory spoke about different strains of the virus and the measures to be taken in the case of an outbreak.

The meeting resulted in recommendations developped by the participants and ended with a presentation of a new sub-regional FMD coordination office in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Last two weeks in August I worked as an English-Russian translator in the Nazarbayev Intellectual School during the training provided by the Cambridge University. The training provided the local high school teachers with an opportunity to discuss the new curriculum for all school subjects with the Cambridge trainers.

First four days I worked with physics teachers, next two – with geography teachers and the last four days with mathematics teachers. Throughout two weeks training we covered a lot of topics such as active learning, student oriented learning, types of feedback and question types, we discussed different resources that can be used during the lessons, we played games that are aimed at engaging students in the active work, we conducted scientific experiments with the materials available in the classroom.
All that time I felt like being back in high school myself: Newton’s laws, gravity, conservation of momentum, functions, sea salinity – all started coming back to me. We watched a short video on astronomy, on our position in the solar system, galaxies and new stars formation – what a great chance to learn something new!
Actually I’ve learned a lot about teaching techniques which was exceptionally interesting for me since I was teaching French in Astana to high school students and I could easily use these techniques and approaches in my work. I learned about different types of activities linked to the Bloom’s taxonomy that help students better understand, memorize, analyze and create knowledge. I have already heard about the Bloom’s taxonomy during my previous translation tasks when I worked in the National Testing center. I am always happy to realize I learn something new from my work and can use the acquired knowledge later on.
It is exciting to be a part of the team that is developing new school course programmes and is implementing it. It will be challenging for both teachers and students, especially since the teaching will be done in three languages: Russian, Kazakh and English, but challenges only make our lives more interesting, don’t they?

On November, 17^th I worked as a simultaneous English-Russian interpreter for ENRC seminar. The seminar was dedicated to a new change management strategy and to the ways of its implementation.

The seminar was interactive; it started with a simulation game: participants were split up into groups, each group being Employers, Employees or Consultants. Participants had a very fruitful discussion; they genuinely played their roles and drew some interesting conclusions.

The seminar was not too difficult as far as translation was concerned, it was quite a general discussion, however there were some specific business terms such as BBR (business benefits realisation), KPI and PPI (key performance indicators and process performance indicators), etc.

The seminar was mainly conducted in Russian with some presentations made in English, so for the most of the time it was Russian-English translation.

It was my first time working with ENRC (Eurasian National Resource Corporation), one of the major natural resources groups with mining, processing as well as logistical and marketing operations. As always, it was an interesting experience for me.

On the June, 1st I provided interpreter services at the II Korean-Kazakhstani Medical Forum. Representatives of 6 different hospitals flew over to Astana to have a presentation of their achievements in treating cancer, cardiovascular diseases, spine injures, etc.

I was assigned to work with Mr. Kyung Woo Park, Deputy Director of the International healthcare center in Seoul National University Hospital. In his presentation Mr. Park touched upon new ways of treatment of ventricular septal defect and other heart diseases: not with the help of bypass surgery but using the percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).

Korean doctors suggested cooperation to their Kazakhstani colleagues, several MOIs were signed and now Kazakhstani patients can be sent to Korea to undergo the necessary treatment.

Once the official part of the forum was over, the more interactive one began. Those who were interested could come up to the booths where the hospitals were present and they could ask questions and exchange contact details.

It was my first experience in translating at the Medical Forum and I learned a lot while preparing for that assignment. I also got to meet and discuss with many interesting people and I would like to personally thank Mr. Park for all the information that he shared with me.

Since April I’ve been involved in two projects of ALSTOM TRANSPORT in Kazakhstan. These are two strategic projects: delivery of electric locomotive and construction of tramway line in Astana. I work mostly as a technical Russian-English translator, sometimes also as a Russian-French translator since ALSTOM is a French company.

The projects are very big so we had several working groups: technical, legal, financial. I mostly work in a technical group where we talk about electric locomotive manufacturing process, about its parameters and technical description. At the beginning I didn’t know much about „locos“ – as we call electric locomotives, I saw no difference between BoBo, double BoBo and CoCo locomotives, but step by step I was getting more and more into it. Now I know why it is that important for a locomotive to have an unbalanced lateral acceleration up to 1.0 m/s2 and what impact it has on the rails and on the locomotive bogie.

But it’s not always the technicians that I translate. Sometimes we have a hectic schedule and after interpreting at the technical meeting, I have to run to a finanical one, where specialists discuss cash flow, overheads and structure of Joint Venture. I also became familiar with the notions such as P&L, CAPEX and OPEX. I might also translate at a legal meetings where I deal with words as precedent conditions, preemptive right and fundamental breach.

Everybody involved in the project worked quite hard, often without days-off and working long hours but it was worth it – on the 27th of October, 2010 in Paris there was signed the Contract by the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the President of France. Now the project is officially launched which means we have more work ahead!