Monolingual short courses for language-specific accreditation : can they work? : a Sydney experience

The continuing flows of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers throughout the world place significant pressures on translating and interpreting services, particularly in finding competent practitioners in many small minority languages. Training is seen as a necessity for many such practitioners who are without qualifications and often without a professional understanding of the field. However, the small size of many of these language communities entails that established interpreting courses can often not find the number of students, or the teachers, to cater for these languages. Many attempts have been made internationally to provide short courses – often generic, sometimes language-specific – for these languages. After surveying such training internationally, this paper describes one such short course in minority languages run for women in Sydney, Australia in 2011, with an emphasis on domestic violence, health and law. The course prepared participants for work in these fields and to sit for Australia’s accreditation exams. The outcomes of the course, while positive in many ways, show the difficulties of short courses in helping a very diverse participant population achieve acceptable standards of interpreting.