A kick-start for my CPD?

Photo by Jess Watters on Unsplash

CPD is defined as Continuing Professional Development and most freelance professionals, as well as people working in-house, make sure to keep up with it following a variety of courses, which can be related to what they do for a living (i.e. a course on a specific graphic design technique), their personal skills (how to introduce themselves/give presentations), or to learn something new that maybe is out of their comfort zone. 
 
Since I joined the Yorkshire Translators and Interpreters (YTI) in September, I took the opportunity to take part in one of the workshops they offer. Luckily, it was about transcreation, one of my first interests when I started making my way through the translation industry, after finishing my studies in Applied Translation Studies. In 2016, I had indeed participated in a workshop in London presented by Adriana Tortoriello, a transcreation and subtitling expert in the UK, and I was really impressed by how much I liked this aspect of translation and how fun, but also challenging, this task could be when it was taken seriously. For this reason, I said to myself ‘why not?’ – surely, participating will not only help me refresh and update what I learnt in the past, but I will also be able to meet new people that work within the industry and have interesting discussions on the matter.
 
Returning to the workshop, it was led by Kim Sanderson, translator and teacher at the University of Durham, and it took place in York. It was structured in a pretty classic way: she gave a presentation on the transcreation and marketing translation sectors, showing some examples of very good and very bad transcreation works that made the participants raise some very stimulating discussion points and lots of input. Then, the participants were divided into groups according to their language combination, however the Italian one was a bit mixed, as it was made of three Italians, a Brit and a Czech. Even so, the outcome and the debates were very interesting as we had different opinions that contributed to achieve impressive results, given the timeframe allowed, and we understood all the shades that the English copy was trying to transmit. Finally, we had a general discussion on the different solutions found by all the groups, having therefore the opportunity to share our thoughts and maybe improve solutions that had already been put forward.
 
Overall, I was very happy and grateful for taking part in this workshop, as it strengthened what I already knew and it allowed some super brainstorming sessions in which translators from different countries gave their opinion and explained some hidden meanings behind the text. It also helped me meet some new people and some people that work within the sector and that I had already met thanks to my previous job.
 
All in all, I look forward to the next CPD session and even though it can happen that sometimes these sessions are not very useful to improve our skills, they are always a good opportunity to meet people and to put ourselves in a different setting that doesn’t make us sit in front of a computer.

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