Dr Kevin Lin, UK top Chinese-English interpreter offered professional training to Durham MATS and TESOL students

Dr Lin has worked in top-level engagement between the UK and China for more than 20 years. He has also worked for generations of chairpersons and CEOs of leading companies and academic institutions of the UK. During this 10-day training course, he shared his experiences as an eminent cross-language communicator and interpreting trainer with intensive training sessions on language competence, conference interpreting skills and interpreting performance assessment. Dr Lin also introduced to students the operational mode of companies in the language services business and welcomed students to take up a professional interpreting career after graduation.

The training course was designed as a hybrid of teaching and research. The teaching sessions were delivered by Dr Lin and his team, with enthusiastic support from the MATS team. The research aspect, led by Prof. Binghan Zheng, was carried out by Prof Zheng’s research team as a Centre for Intercultural Mediation annual research project. Apart from attending the lectures and seminars, the students were invited to participate in a series of interpreting performance recordings, eye-tracking experiments and cognitive functioning tasks, etc. The research results will serve as essential data for investigating and discussing key topics in interpreting studies.

This event aims to explore the possibility of collaboration between real-world practice, classroom teaching and academic research in translation and interpreting. We welcome more opportunities for our students to work with top tier translation practitioners and academic researchers.