Gain & Share: new manifestations

Last week Pavel Palazhchenko conducted a course of master classes for a combined group of one customer’s translation service employees and Neotech translation department specialists.

The theme of the lectures was “Problems and techniques of scientific editing”, using materials from the customer’s company by way of exercises.  The course did not, naturally, stop there, nor could it: when a lesson is taught by one of the greatest professionals in the field of simultaneous interpretation, the author of many dictionaries and books, and the director of the department of international affairs and contacts for the “Gorbachev-Fund” press, touching on other topics is inevitable.

From the responses of lesson participants:

• “Based on what I knew before of Pavel Palazhchenko, I expected a very useful and entertaining time.”
• “The course exceeded all expectations.”
• “It allowed one to systemize previous knowledge while inspiring one to independent work in generalizing and systemizing knowledge.”
• “The professor’s experience, the teaching technique, the responses to concerns – that was what I found most interesting, informative, and useful.”

Aside from the high appraisal of the master classes’ usefulness and information-packed content, particular words of recognition and gratitude were bestowed on the professor himself – an extraordinarily engaging, approachable, and cheerful person.  We won’t cite all responses, allowing ourselves only this quote: “Absolutely, Pavel Palazhchenko’s style of presenting the material is extremely prepossessing: his teaching is conducted in a relaxed, unforced manner, and the professor supplements his narration with examples from experience, answering questions readily and in detail without losing the main thread of the lesson.”

The course was followed by a workers conference at Neotech, at which issues of the usefulness of similar lessons were discussed, where representatives of both sides involved in the translation process – the client company and its linguistic accompaniment partner – would gather in a single auditorium.  This would involve not only the study of mutual materials, but developing examples from their mutual working practice.  In this instance the professor would appear in a somewhat unusual role: that of objective judge of both sides.  As Neotech editor Maria Tyeplova noted, “I learned a lot about methods of correcting errors that frequently appear in texts submitted for editing.  During the training I found answers to many of the issues that an editor constantly has to resolve in their daily work.  For many of the problems several possible solutions were proposed, which will help to make future edited texts not only of higher linguistic quality, but also more lexically varied.”  Based on the opinion of those who took the training, then spent several days working scrupulously and seriously under Pavel Palazhchenko’s supervision, Neotech’s administration has resolved to continue the practice of conducting similar courses in the future.