Studying again!

Hi Everybody!

I would like to share with you my experience at the Norwegian university Oslo Met (Oslo Metropolitan University):

This year I started one year career in Interpretation from Norwegian to Italian and from Italian to Norwegian. Since I wanted to increase and improve my Norwegian level I thought that the only way was to study it through a career, because first of all the level is higher and also because I knew I had to take a step further in my everday Norwegian which is intermediate.

It is a part time career so I can combine it with my job and one weekend per month we meet at the university for some classes and group exercises. Once per week,we have chats and also we have one year to learn how to become a good interpreter of category 3, which is the intermediate level and with this category we can work freelance for customers in particular cases which involve for example the Sanitary system or the Legal one, etc.

Before starting the career we had to take an exam to check our level in both languages and our level in interpretation and I passed it, I got the category 5, so now let’s go for the 3rd!

Now you can imagine how many specific words I have seen and learned and how many techniques I read to be a good interpreter so far, but now my biggest problem is: will I remember everything or the most of it? I will try my best of course, but it is a big challenge because I am studying a career in my fifth language learned…

Sometimes I feel exhausted because it is nor Spanish or English which I domain better, but it is Norwegian, one of the most difficult languages I have ever learned so far. But I will commit myself to do the best because I like studying and especially learning new words of a language. It is very interesting and it stimulates my brain to work and be trained to work better and of course be smarter 😊.

I just need to find a trick to memorize all I can and use the techniques during the interpretation exercises to improve my abilities. The funniest thing is that they record us while we are taking an interpretation exercise and this helps a lot because it lets you study yourself: how do I do it? How do I move during the practice? Do I say right things, do I translate/interpret right? Am I professional? It helps a lot, so next time I will be better because I will remember my videotape. In my first video I saw myself interpreting and I liked it, even if I found some mistakes that of course I can correct for next time. Interesting eh?

The only one thing I don’t like is that during one of the chat classes we had, the teacher asked some questions and we had to answer and everybody was typing like it was a competition, to see who was writing first and what and get such points or «correct answer» from the teacher; I felt stressed the first time because it should have been a discussion about a theme we were studying and not a race, but anyway the rest of the chats were better maybe because they were managed by another teacher. And of course the rest of the career is very good. An interesting chat class is with our Italian tutor: we are just 4 people for the Italian language and we discuss some terminology lists in different contexts; so we share our experience, our knowledge and it is very pleasant because I am learning new words in my own language and in Norwegian and how to use them in several contexts. My colleagues are very good people and it is always so awesome meeting new people with different backgrounds: there is a Norwegian guy, he is 25 and he lived in Florence during three years and he studied the career in languages and literatures, he speaks a very good Italian with a funny Tuscan accent. He is very smart and of course being Norwegian he can help us translate and interpret in a right way to Italian. The other one is an Italian interpreter, she is here since ten years and as she is in the profession already she can teach us how to be professional and which kind of words it is good to use in certain contexts and the last colleague he is Italian too, he is a policeman and in his job they need an Italian interpreter so as he studied languages he thought to study this career and of course it is good for his professional job too.

I am very lucky and interested in this profession because I love to learn from people with different backgrounds and experiences as from books! I am curious and I dig in! Let’s do that then!!!