Tag: exams

No Pressure or Anything

~ Athena Sky Interpreting ~ Leave a comment

7:30am
I wake up with a quick, optimistic check to my inbox. No email. Oh well, I sigh. I wasn’t really expecting the results to come in that early. I roll over in bed. Thirty seconds go by. I check my email again. “It’s going to be a long day…” I inform my husband.

8:00am
I’m out of bed now, making breakfast. Eggs. Toast. Avocado. I take it outside. I water the garden, which isn’t a garden exactly, more like a carefully curated set of flowerpots on our terrace. Still, it’s mine, it’s beautiful, and it lets me care for things and lets things grow. All summer it has been a welcome distraction from my constant studying.

Meanwhile, I can’t help myself. I check my email ten more times.

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Language Skills-Building for Interpreters

~ Athena Sky Interpreting ~ Leave a comment

Interpreters face somewhat of a conundrum upon entering the profession. That is, we are expected to have “native-level” discourse and comprehension skills in all of our languages. Advertisements boast “perfect fluency,” and respectable interpreting courses necessarily steer their content away from language acquisition. Yet, of course, secretly we realize that none of us is perfectly fluent in any language; not even close. So, I think it’s time for us all to admit that we have some work to do in the area of language and that there is nothing shameful about this.

That brings me to today’s topic.

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The Final Frontier

~ Athena Sky Interpreting ~ 1 Comment

I kind of feel like my fall should be entitled, Conference Interpreting: The Final Frontier. Because (that’s right, drum roll!) on September 10th I begin classes at Glendon College, York University, for the Master’s in Conference Interpreting (MCI) program.

The start of my classes will mark the culmination of over a decade of work. It´s been sixteen years (half my short lifetime) since I started learning Spanish and French. I’ve already blogged about sweating over the subjunctive, all the hours spent on interpreting tests and several years working as a staff interpreter, so I won’t do it over now. Suffice it to say that it’s been a very long time since I told my professors that I wanted to work at the UN one day. This fall we will see if I’m even close to meeting the challenge.

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