I am glad to welcome you to my site. If you are looking for a consecutive or conference (simultaneous) interpreter I will be pleased to offer you my services. I have been working as an interpreter/translator since 2007. First I worked as a staff interpreter/translator in major oil & gas companies and then in 2007 became a private interpreter. I specialize on the following topics: oil and gas, transport, petrochemistry, IT, electronics, economics, marketing, business, politics and general. For more details about me please see
This year it has been even more exciting for me than before. I was lucky to interpret the sessions on very diverse topics:
Unmanned vehicles (love technologies!);
Charity and humanitarian aid;
Inclusion;
Cinema and TV series;
Culture and traditional values;
Dialogue and cooperation between Indonesia and Russia.
Proud to be the voice of:
Diana Gurtskaya and Anita Tsoy, famous singers;
Timur Weinstein, NTV channel producer, and Sergey Zharkov, actor;
Maria Kiseleva, 3-time Olympic Champion in Synchronous Swimming
Denis Manturov, First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia
and many other esteemed participants
These were very intensive, stressful, tiring, mind blowing but still very rewarding three days for me packed with challenges, joyful meetings with the colleagues I have not seen for a long time, early mornings and late nights, preparation marathons, chasing after presentations and hopefully receiving them in time, the list goes on… The highlight of this Forum was undoubtedly when I was told by one of administrators (when I tried to get ppts copied to my USB) that we, the interpreters, cannot possibly have any issues since we have a PROMPTER telling us all we need to say directly in our ears. This made my day for sure
My first trip to China – to 2025 BRICS Engineering Congress in Shenzhen. So many impressions and takeaways – I can hardly cover them in one post. But I will do my best. The first day of the Congress went as planned. Nickolay and me duly checked the equipment beforehand, met the delegation at 2 pm and started conference interpreting at 8 pm (quite unusual but fine with us). The setup looked a bit different from what we usually see at big multilingual events. There were 3 working languages: Russian, English and Chinese. To be on the safe side, the organizers decided on having 3 booths instead of two: ZH-EN, ZH-RU and RU-EN, that is us. This made our job easier, of course, since nobody needed to use relay or so we thought at that time. So we did our first day this way, the meeting lasted till 9:30 pm, it ended even a bit ahead of the agenda for obvious reasons I believe – delegates needed their well-deserved rest.
And yet, it was the second day that proved to be a make or break point for me and Nikolay. It all started out as planned with the Ru-Eng booth routinely going offline every time Chinese was spoken on the floor. But there was a tricky part, as well: It proved unusually hard to stay focused on the proceedings while our booth was not in a working mode. However, there were other challenges as well. At one point we had to take relay from our ZH-EN colleagues since one of ZH-RU interpreters had to leave the booth to help with consecutive interpretation at a parallel meeting and we had to step in.
The second day the Congress ended routinely at 6 pm, but, surprise surprise! our working day was far from over. Nikolay and me were invited to interpret at a bilateral meeting at 8 pm. “Nothing special, just another brief exchange of pleasantries”, I thought, sensing no trouble. Well… I was so wrong. That ‘brief’ meeting quickly degenerated into a heated argument that went for as many as four hours with everyone (and particularly the interpreters) absolutely exhausted in the end. We were interpreting consecutively, often taking big chunks at a time. It helped that Nikolay and me split sides from the start: I was interpreting into Russian and Nikolay into English, it gave us some time to breathe. Finally, we moved on to interpret in short phrases right after the speakers making the discussion more dynamic. When we finished at 12 I thought I would just collapse there and then.
To top it all, the following day we were expected to show up at 7:55 am and interpret during a guided tour. Our flight back was scheduled for 7 am next day, so we did not sleep the last night either. And yet, for all the intense work and hard time we had, I have all reason to be proud of what we’ve done and how it all went. Looking forward to more of such challenging (crossed) fantastic opportunities to come!
Had a great talk with Alexey Chernenko (TRANSLIT), Alexey Gusev (TRANSLIT) and Arsen Lasursky (BCG) about the present and future of live interpretation events, link to the record.
My new article featuring the interview with Pedro-José Espinosa, Chief interpreter at the United Nations Nairobi office is out, here is the link. We tlaked about the UN interpreter team’s response to Covid-19.
