Heidelberg University Conference Interpreting

HeiCIC – The Heidelberg Conference Interpreting Corpus – a collaborative project created at the behest of the research community. It currently features several hundreds of recordings in the eight floor languages of the Heidelberg ShowCase CI Studies Conferences series. Gleaning empirical data to lay the foundation of further research into high performance strategies has been on the tops of our  minds for years.

Now the MA Conference Interpreting Programme has a slate of technical conventions to showcase advanced methods of conference interpreting. Both the efficiency and levels of performance afforded by modern, partially automated preparation methods for LSP conferences can now be explained and documented using large amounts of machine readable data.

The project aims at collecting and analysing the Heidelberg Conference Interpreting Corpus. HeiCIC collates recordings of conferences in different LSP contexts: engineering, shareholder meetings. The main research focus of the initial project phase is to qualitatively and quantitatively explore interpretation strategies in relation to types of preparation and genre/ register (field, tenor, mode).

Students contribute as part of the research community, working on projects for their term papers, MA or Ph.D. theses. They also look into the corpus in our interpreting courses to validate quality criteria of preparation strategies and the method inventory of high performance strategies. Interpreters work in simultaneous booths into and between the working languages of our MA Conference Interpreting Programme.

To contextualise the learner corpus, young professionals and seasoned (AIIC) interpreters work alongside as a reference, producing several interpretations of the same presentation in parallel. Recordings and their transcriptions along with meta data are aligned with information about interpreters’ preparation strategies and resources (e.g. glossaries, CAI tools and CCT maps).

Students contribute as part of the research community, working on projects for their term papers, MA or Ph.D. theses. They also look into the HeiCIC corpus to validate quality criteria of preparation techniques and the method inventory of high performance strategies to manage semantic priming cues and glossaries for technical meetings digitally.

CIRP Server Log-In (Conference Interpreting Research Server)

Conference Interpreters work for International Institutions such as the European Union, the United Nations and the European Central Bank. They translate Heads of State and Government, ministers and opinion leaders in the limelight of international relations, technical conferences and scientific conventions.

It goes without saying that such responsibility comes with a measure of exposure as the wordings interpreters choose while thinking on their feet come under close scrutiny of the public eye.

To train responsible professionals who meet these exacting standards is the mandate which the University of Heidelberg has vested in its postgraduate master’s programme for conference interpreters.

Practicing conference interpreters train carefully selected cohorts of young talent to hold their own under the unforgiving strain of being on‐air at technical conferences, where hundreds of listeners can depend on the skill of that one interpreter who currently works the mike.

Organising vast amounts of technical terminology, scientific papers and documentation are just some of the skills involved. Seasoned professionals also re‐arrange the concepts of a speech to render the meaning clearly and succinctly in the target language. Clarity of mind is as important to a conference interpreter as is excellent command of language.

In the day and age of befuddled communication in idioms spoken as a foreign language, delegates and conference organisers increasingly use interpreters to render communication more effective and focused on content matter ‐ using communication professionals has become a hallmark of being professional.

Founded in 1930, during the early days of simultaneous interpreting, it is to our knowledge the oldest and most venerable such programme world‐wide. Likewise, it has become outstandingly successful when it comes to the success of its graduates, having trained a very large share of the professionals who work with German in their combination throughout Europe.

The University of Heidelberg’s MA in Conference Interpreting is an Ivy League international training programme. It is a springboard to careers of interpreters working for Embassies, Federal Ministries, the EU and in the Private Market, comprising eight core languages, with German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian ‐ most also as A‐Languages, which gives it unique international standing among similar programmes.

The course is designed by professional interpreters in the spirit of AIICs (Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence) core values for interpreter training, in close collaboration with the heads of interpreting at international organisations and consultant interpreters. Both syllabus and evaluation criteria are constantly fine‐tuned to meet exacting professional standards.

Moving beyond the day‐to‐day experience of professionals, the faculty of IÜD are collating their collective experience systematically in research projects: Interpreting Science today has become an established discipline in its own right, with thousands of publications.

Systematically optimising strategies, organising them into interpreting models, and learning modules make for better interpreters: at a Heidelberg University competence level.