Perspectives of Trainers and Trainees on Online Interpreting Courses at BME’s Centre for Interpreter and Translator Training

Abstract

Due to Covid-19, most education institutions, including tertiary level institutions, found themselves in a predicament, particularly those that teach specific skills and rely heavily on equipment and infrastructure. Interpreter training institutions also had to switch to remote learning in a short space of time and transfer methodological solutions – applied routinely in classrooms – to online platforms by learning to use a set of new technologies. The first part of the paper outlines a number of surveys conducted to explore teachers' and students' views of online education on the one hand, and it also offers examples of international and national cooperation schemes between various training institutions on the other hand. The second part of the paper provides the reader with a summary of – mainly positive – experience gained at the interpreter training courses at the Centre for Translator and Interpreter Training (TFK) of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), with a specific focus on four modes of interpreting: sight translation, consecutive, simultaneous and liaison.