Abstract
The volume is a comprehensive account of how community translation and interpreting (T&I) education (in formal tertiary settings) and training (non-degree or short courses) reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, with contributors from all over the world covering both signed and spoken languages. Its title adequately matches its contents, predominantly focusing on community interpreting, although conference interpreting is also often referred to, whether to highlight the differences between these two evolving professions or to account for programmes offering both subjects. The editors, two women and one man, reflect the gender disparity of the interpreting profession, as does the distribution of the 26 other contributors to the volume, with 20 women (70%) and 6 men (30%). Gender identification was mainly based on the contributors’ biographies and their use of personal pronouns.
The volume contains 17 chapters. In Chapters 1 and 17, Lai helps to frame the 13 contributed chapters by either anticipating common theoretical and terminological issues (e.g., the notion of emergency remote teaching—ERT—or hybrid and blended learning configurations, represented in Figure 1, p. 6) or by recapping and further expanding certain themes that appeared to be recurring (like that of accessible and equal technological measures, summarised in Table 1, pp. 361–364). In her introduction, Lai states that: With T&I being a practice-based profession, it is understandable why programs and courses placed much emphasis on extensive in-person practice with an advanced instructor and why the apprenticeship model was thought to work best. This volume, therefore, intends to provide an account of the disruption to T&I education and training by the pandemic, how the educators pivoted in a short time by using technologies to respond to the unprecedented emergency, and the lessons learned from such experience to take T&I education and the profession into the future. (p. 4)
In the final chapter, she underlines the specificities of a volume of “collective memory” (p. 371) and contributes to answering the question “where to from here,” concluding that: What lies ahead of everyone is more flexible ways to learn and study, an ever-expanding range of technologies at our disposal, and the need for mediating language discordances in more and more communities around the world. It is, therefore, an exciting and hopeful time to be involved in community T&I.
While appreciating Lai’s optimism, I believe that some, if not many, colleagues in T&I education and training would also express fears and perplexities with regard to the present and the future of the profession. It is therefore worth mentioning that this volume also portrays the darker side of ERT and, at least for some of the authors, the desire to go back to pre-Coronavirus times.
The 13 contributed chapters are organised alphabetically according to the country of focus, and I will start by presenting their contents and author(s), who are not mentioned by Lai in her introduction to individual chapters.
Chapter 2, on Argentina and Uruguay, is co-authored by Agustina Marianacci and Alejandra González Campanella, who present a selection of T&I programmes and contrast the situation of Argentina, where T&I is a complex discipline with various public and private study programmes (the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and Estudio Lucille Barnes offer such programmes, for example), and Uruguay, which has no dedicated interpreting degree available (although potentially useful courses exist in the Universidad de la República and the Universidad de Montevideo). A key finding in relation to remote learning during the pandemic is the democratisation of access to education for students from different areas of South America, as well as the difference between knowledge- and skill-based components of teaching, the former being relatively easily delivered online while the latter highly benefit from face-to-face classes.
Chapter 3 is on Australia, which also receives a special mention in Lai’s introduction, since it is “the first country in the world to set up a comprehensive credentialling system for community interpreters and translators” (p. 15). The co-authors, Erika González García, Caroline Norma, and Olga García-Caro, underline the role of the Australian national certification system (National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters [NAATI]) and describe the wide spectrum of languages, including Auslan, of this multilingual country. After distinguishing between tertiary education and non-award training, the authors focus on one postgraduate programme at RMIT University, the first to offer T&I programmes in 1975. They detail the use of its learning management system (Canvas, offering an internal remote meeting/class option via Collaborate Ultra) in both T&I courses, where the platform was far from ideal for conference interpreting and trainers had to find other ways to provide feedback and encourage reflective practices.
Chapter 4, on Belgium, by Heidi Salaets, pays special attention to legal (community) interpreting and shares the experience of the accredited KU Leuven 1-year Master’s programme in interpreting. She takes the note-taking techniques course as a case study and underlines the importance of support from people working in Information and Communication Technologies in moving from Collaborate and Kaltura (within the Toledo learning environment) to Microsoft Teams and Zoom, defined as the “absolute champion of the online class” (p. 80). She then reflects extensively on the ABC student-centred methodology (Arena—Blended—Connected), designed before the COVID-19 crisis by Young and Perović (2016) within the ASSET-H project, highlighting the importance of international research.
Chapter 5, on Canada, is written by Debra Russell, Corene Kennedy, Rhondda Reynolds, and Barb Mykle-Hotzon, who jointly present the learning and teaching insights gained at two Canadian sign language interpreter education programmes, one in Vancouver and one in Toronto. Starting from the premise that Canada is a bilingual country (English-French) with two sign languages, American Sign Language (ASL) and Langue des Signes Québécoise (LSQ), the authors underline the importance of quality programmes that draw lessons from temporary ERT, where “we build this airplane as we fly it” (p. 105), in order to counterbalance some of its pitfalls (from “Zoom fatigue” to the blurring of personal and professional space) and better plan online learning opportunities.
Chapter 6, on China, co-authored by Zhimiao Yang, Riccardo Moratto, and Irene A. Zhang, describes one Master’s programme at the Shanghai International Studies University, where consecutive, simultaneous, and sight interpreting are taught. The authors report on a student survey on pedagogical changes in response to COVID-19, which included 24 multiple-choice questions (provided in the Appendix) and received 56 completed questionnaires. The results reveal that Tencent Meeting was the most used online meeting platform, followed by Zoom, and show the amount of work students did outside of online classes.
Chapter 7, on New Zealand, is co-authored by Ineke Crezee, one of the book’s editors, Wei Teng, and Vanessa Enríquez Raído. They present three post-graduate programmes offered at Auckland University of Technology, University of Auckland, and Canterbury University, thereby covering both the North Island and the South Island. The three authors provide separate descriptions of how course design and assessment have changed before, during, and after COVID-19 stressing the importance of technical infrastructure and discussing the challenges and solutions.
Chapters 8, 9, and 10 are single-authored. Mahmoud Altarabin focuses on Palestine and provides rare insights into one undergraduate programme at the Islamic University of Gaza, which is currently experiencing another disruption to its education systems. At the time of writing, it was still benefitting from some of the lessons learnt during COVID-19, when students used Moodle for remote learning, with 100 of them participating in the author’s study. Harold M. Lesch focuses on South Africa and discusses one post-graduate T&I programme at Stellenbosch University, where the author is based, reporting how trainers struggled to keep students “interpreting fit” (p. 198) and ensure that they would not lose an academic year in a developing country where many of them have problems connecting and using data in the university learning management system (SUNLearn), or on Speechpool. Jieun Lee presents a short course funded by the police in South Korea, a country featuring dozens of post-graduate conference interpreting training programmes, but none for community T&I, so the police currently depend on on-site interpreting by its own interpreter pool or on volunteer telephone interpreting services.
Chapter 11, on Spain, co-authored by Bianca Vitalaru and Mustapha Taibi, presents the 1-year Master’s programme at the University of Alcalá, one of the few programmes covering different settings of community T&I in Spain. The authors describe the didactic planning tool introduced during the pandemic (Blackboard) and compare students’ grades before (when the Master’s already involved some forms of blended learning) and after.
Chapter 12, on Türkiye, co-authored by Aymil Dogan, Duygu Çurum Duman, and Özge Çetin, first describes how community interpreting has developed in this country (where “Emergency and Disaster Interpreting” came into existence well before COVID-19, p. 255) and then introduces available training and university education. Based on a survey involving 20 interpreting educators, the authors also present the learning management systems used (in Turkish UZEM, meaning Centre for Distant Education) and summarise the positives and negatives of distance education, where some activities are most suited for remote teaching (like sight translating) while others are not ideal (like managing eye contact and turns at talk in community interpreting), and where the biggest challenge is to maintain students’ motivation.
Chapter 13, on Ukraine, by Oleksandra Litvinyak, provides an overview of T&I profession and education in this country and then focuses on the programmes offered at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (IFNUL), where students are expected to master both translation and interpreting. Based on two surveys, one for academic staff and one for students, the author analyses how things have changed due to the pandemic and presents the many technologies used in class for videoconferencing, engagement, gamification, and integration of digital resources. She thereby offers useful ideas on how to react to turbulent times, including those of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, which is also impacting on education at IFNUL, although with different implications for training accessibility, which the author describes in detail (pp. 286–287).
The final contributed chapter, focusing on the United States, is co-authored by Cristiano Mazzei and Laurence Jay-Rayon Ibrahim Aibo, who start by offering a comprehensive account of the profession, specifically in the health and legal domains, where certification exams have been developed but are not available for all languages and where there are very few tertiary certificate programmes relating to community T&I, all of them covering “powerful languages” (p. 297). The two authors then focus on the training workshops they organise for adult immigrants seeking education and training, who often lack basic digital literacy.
“After this ‘round-the-world’ trip detailing how community T&I education and training pivoted in response to the disruption brought on by the pandemic,” as Lai puts it (p. 26), the other two editors offer further food for thought in Chapters 15 and 16 with self-explicatory titles: Eser’s Chapter 15 “Reflections on technology: building instructional technology into community T&I education” and Crezee’s Chapter 16 “Reflections on government responses and industry practice with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic.” They both offer useful reflections, not only for educators and trainers, but also for other institutional, governmental, and industrial stakeholders involved in web 2.0 technologies, instructional media, language services, as well as in the assessment of health problems and cognitive challenges related to T&I education and training.
I shall conclude by discussing certain contents that are of particular relevance, in my view, for interpreter trainers, starting with Chapter 5 on Canadian sign language interpreter education by Russell et al. As has often been the case in interpreting studies, in which sign language research has led to identifying the limitations of certain concepts (such as interpreter invisibility, see Ozolins, 2016) and in showing that community interpreters actively participate in mediated interactions, it is this chapter that best reveals the limitations of two-dimensional online education, where screens limit visual access to the “embodied” achievement of understanding (Mondada, 2011) and where the presence of many Zoom squares makes it difficult to engage meaningfully in classroom interaction. This chapter also, however, highlights the many serendipitous moments and gifts of COVID-19, such as the extension of the professional networks of students and trainers by the granting of access to events all over the world and the increasing of moments of self-reflection, a recurring topic in the volume, treated extensively by Salaets in Chapter 4. Starting from a shared storyboard, describing the building blocks of a 5-week course so that trainers/students know how each type of training activity fits within its broader context, Salaets reflects on the use of GoReact to teach consecutive interpreting and presents the results of a survey involving both students and trainers. One of the results is that the use of GoReact had a negative impact on the trainers’ workload, since they had to provide extensive individual feedback on students’ recorded performances, which led to the decision to introduce peer and self-assessment in the storyboard. As also demonstrated in the chapter by Lesch, increased doses of peer and self-assessment can contribute to the development of critical thinking and self-reflection capabilities, which are of great importance for would-be interpreters. The main limitation, as Salaets recognises in her conclusions, is that when feedback is provided one-to-one, the rest of the class does not benefit from this feedback, unlike before COVID-19, when the whole class would hear. Salaets, nevertheless, concludes that “it is essential to convince all trainers to use new methods of teaching and training, including the GoReact tool, because in 2022 and after the pandemic, stating that the only way to teach interpreting skills is in the live classroom is old-school and not forward thinking” (p. 93). As true as this is, unfortunately, not all teachers have the skills to think forward, and not all students are truly tech-savvy (see p. 103 of Chapter 5 on Canada) or always connected (see the chapters on Palestine and Ukraine, especially Litvinyak’s reflections on COVID-time vs. war-time learning). If one truly wants to think forward, one must consider all the implications of accessible learning and teaching in both spoken and sign language environments via technology, as well as the emotional needs and wellbeing of both students and trainers.
In conclusion, I strongly recommend this edited volume for any T&I educators and trainers who are trying to take stock of and draw lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and are looking for insights from all over the world. I would also encourage other stakeholders (including T&I service providers and users) to take a look at this volume to understand the implications of technologies for the T&I profession, as both its present and future call for shared responsibility and jointly achieved quality.