ITI translation course: summary and review

Ok. First things first: why the delay in posting about the ITI translation course?

The training course officially ended on 18 March, a grand total of 40 days ago. Which is the equivalent to 3 years and 2 days in blog years. But there is a good reason for this blog inactivity: I’ve been busy translating. And I think a lot of this extra work is thanks to the course.

But I’m taking advantage of a translation lull to give you a round-up of the course and share some thoughts on what I’ve learnt.

The first thing to say is that it exceeded my expectations. Before the course began I took a look at the programme and thought that it looked very useful but some of the topics covered old ground. Subjects such as CVs or word processing skills.

But now that I’ve covered all of the modules I have to say that each and every one of them contained something new. Some of this came from the tutors, and a lot from the interaction between course participants.

In fact I learnt just as much from the questions asked in the Yahoo group as I did in the exercises. And it was very liberating to be able to post comments I would think twice about posting on a regular translation forum.

Secondly, the mentoring part of the course was worth the fee alone. Having an experienced translator review your work and offer constructive feedback helped me in two ways. It boosted my confidence to see my receive positive comments. And I was able to ask for advice on coping with sections of text that were a bit tricky.

So would I recommend the course to others? Most definitely. A big thank you to my mentor, to all of the tutors and fellow students for making the course so enjoyable.