The United Nations (or almost) at Unitec

Sarah Bampton, Anna Guo and Hong Yu Gong from the Certificate in Liaison Interpreting team

Sally Conway, Academic Programme Manager in our Bridgepoint School, reflects on the recent Certificate in Liaison Interpreting exams…

If you had been around Building 170 a couple of weekends ago, you may well have thought that there was a grouping of different members from the United Nations. But no, the Certificate in Liaison Interpreting (CLI) students were taking their Oral exam. Semester 1 has seen the final delivery of this programme in its current form with a record 56 students enrolled. Of those 56 students, 21 different languages were being spoken.

Our teaching team has been training the students over the semester on how to interpret quickly, fluently and of course accurately from their own language (known as LOTE- Language Other than English) into English and back again.

Saturday 26 June was a special day as everything came together. The CLI Team set up 56 interviews, each 40 minute long. With 56 students, we needed 27 contractors who spoke the other language (the LOTE) and 10 Language Studies staff, all looking fairly lost in Building 170. Each interview involved three people:

1. The student Interpreter
2. The LOTE person
3. One of our Language Studies staff who played the role of the English speaking “official,” be it someone from the Police, a Surgeon or a WINZ Officer.

The 21 languages included (in no particular order), Mandarin, Korean, Cantonese, Tongan, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Malay, Turkish, Arabic, Pashto, Burmese, Hindi, Samoan, Japanese, Kiribati, Thai, Dari, Bengali, German, Spanish and Malayalam. What a marathon event!

A special thanks to everyone involved to make this happen from the Language Teaching staff for giving up their Saturday, to Long Black for opening specially and of course Anna Guo, Sarah Bampton and Hong Yu Gong for making this such an successful event.

Now we can happily say that graduates of this programme can go out and serve their communities to bridge that language gap.

Note: From Semester 2 2021 the Certificate in Liaison Interpreting has been replaced by 2 Micro credentials: Liaison Interpreting Contexts and Liaison Interpreting Theory and Practice.