Oleksandra Litvinyak

Lectures on interpreting: useful or useless?

A common belief is that when it comes to training interpreters it is best to make them practice as much as possible and this can hardly be denied. However, is doing interpreting exercises enough? Are we not missing anything? Just skills, even honed to perfection, are not enough to survive professionally. The students should be equipped with a certain amount of knowledge about their profession, potential places of employment and what that might entail. Therefore, we believe that an introductory lecture course and, sometimes, even more advanced lecture courses for student interpreters might prove quite useful. The lectures might help students learn what they are required and not required to do, what are the main types and modes of interpreting, what evolution the profession of an interpreter has gone through, what is interpreter competence and why it is needed. Lectures may also address the issues of quality and ethics which are often neglected in practical classes. The problems of communication with clients and membership in different professional associations is another aspect that could be addressed in class to help future interpreters prepare for professional life. The present paper examines the lecture courses related to interpreting taught at the Hryhoriy Kochur Department of Translation/Interpreting Studies and Contrastive Linguistics of the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv (Ukraine) to determine how useful they might be to future interpreters. A detail analysis of topics constitutes an attempt at defining the success stories and problematic points with a view of suggesting some improvements.

Oleksandra Litvinyak (PhD in Translation Studies) is an interpreter and translator (working in English/Ukrainian combination) and interpreter/translator trainer at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. Courses taught include: introduction to consecutive interpreting, pragmatics of simultaneous interpreting, practical interpreting and translation. Author of 25 scholarly papers and 2 manuals, translator and co-translator of 4 books.