Leeds Conference Interpreting Students Completed Dummy Booth Interpreting Visit to the United Nations at Geneva (UNOG)

On 12 July students from the 2023-2024 Chinese cohort of MA Conference Interpreting in University of Leeds completed their dummy booth interpreting study visit to the UNOG.

The study visit was supervised by Prof. Binhua Wang, who had liaised with the UNOG about the study visit.

During the study visit, our interpreting students practiced dummy booth interpreting in the 56th session of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), and the 11th session of the UNCTAD Multi-Year Expert Meeting on Trade, Services and Development.

Olga Markides, the Officer-in-Charge of the Interpretation Service in UNOG, welcomed us on the first day and issued the study visit certificate to all the students on the last day. The students received feedback from UN staff interpreters XIE Qiong, TAN Ziwei, ZHU Xiaohua, LI Jingzhong (an alumnus of Leeds), WU Jie, ZHAO Junxiang and Alice Ryckmans. Alice Ryckmans also offered a coaching session on text analysis in sight interpreting.

All the students commended that the UN study visit was both inspirational and stimulating in bridging our classroom training with real-world interpreting experience. One student said: “The study visit experience opened a new world for me, providing insights into the highest level of simultaneous interpreting. It has further strengthened my determination to become an interpreter.” Another student said: “This UN study visit is a perfect and memorable experience from which I learned so much about how to prepare myself for my interpreting career.”

We are very proud of our students' performance and professionalism during the study visit. As UN staff interpreter Alice Ryckmans commented in her feedback, “Their (the students’) active participation and very relevant observations testify to the high level of training and teaching received so far.”

We’d like to express sincere thanks to XIE Qiong and TAN Ziwei, for their coordination of the study visit on behalf of the UNOG, and to other the UNOG staff interpreters, for their generous support in making this visit an exceptionally enriching experience for our students.