Translator Astana

On May, 22-24th I provided simultaneous translation services at the VI Astana Economic Forum. The Forum is a big-scale annual event and it is the third time that I participate in the Forum.

The second day we were at the session: “Entrepreneurship in Kazakhstan: challenges and opportunities” which was followed by the sessions on transition to a green economy and by a political discussion on Kazakhstan, Russia and the EU with a participation of a former President of Poland.

Together with my collegue we worked at a session dedicated to Expo 2017 Astana and the fact that I am actively involved in that project really helped as I knew the speakers and the materials they were presenting.

We also provided simulatenous English-Russian and Russian -English translation during the participants’ dinner.

Besides its numerous sessions, the Forum offers a big variety of side events, many foreign companies and Embassies participate in those events.

The couple days during the Forum are always very busy for the translators, translators are booked couple months in advance to ensure their availability. Additional interpreters are brought from Almaty, Moscow and other cities to provide a necessary number of translators that the Forum requires.

Annualy the Forum gathers schientists, businessmen, and journalists from all over the world. It is a great honor to be a part if this huge event.

Last Wednesday I did simultaneous translation at the I Convention of Mathematicians of Kazakhstan. I worked together with a Kazakh-Russian translator, whereas I was doing Russian-English translation for the participants of the Convention.

The Convention was held by the Vice Prime Minister and by the Minister of Education and Science, speeches were delivered by academicians, professors, scientists and school teachers. There were representatives from all the regions of Kazakhstan, and also some foreign delegations.

As a Russian translator I have never worked with mathemeticians before and last time I was dealing with equations and derivatives was back in high school, so it was interesting to refresh this knowledge as well as to learn something new. There were quite specific mathematic topics covered but there was also a discussion on the mathematicians in the republic in general and on the problems that they tackle, such as lack of the good modern textbooks, poor translation of Russian books into Kazakh, and lack of young specialist willing to become teachers of mathematics.

Translating mathematics was an interesting and new experience for me which is a good news as I like learning something new every day, I think my school teacher would be proud of my knowledge in mathematics now 🙂