Wanted...Native English Interpreters

CILT, the National Centre for Languages - News

This news story popped up in my Reader today and immediately grabbed my attention.
The European Commission is facing a potential crisis due to a lack interpreters who are native speakers of English. Almost all meetings of the Commision require interpretation into English. If none are available meetings are cancelled.
According to the Head of the Commission's interpreting unit, demand for native English interpreters is increasing, whilst CILT research has indicated and ever increasing shortage of skilled linguists across all sectors.

HMMMMMMM! Why could this be? Could this be the result of ridiculous short sightedness of successive governments to promote the positive aspects of language learning. I think so. For too long schools have been allowed to demote languages from the core curriculum...mainly because they are perceived as difficult and therefore adversely skew results and therefore standings in utterly non-educationally sound league tables.

Due to governmental policy and results based thinking at management levels a massive skills gap is opening up and there are no where near enough people to fill it.

The English Government has put £8 million into a programme to increase take up of languages at university, but is this not too late. Youngsters need to have developed a liking for (or even have experienced) a language earlier in life.

My solution (and I'm willing to admit I could be wrong):

• get more language specialists from the local secondary into feeder primary schools. In Scotland with GLOW coming on board this could be done via GLOW Meet, covering more than one school / classroom. (Not simply deliver lessons but to support those primary teachers confident enough to deal with a language)
  
• get them in earlier and throughout primary, making sure there is continuity

Hopefully then,there would be a real level of consistency of experience and the transition to secondary could be marked with a real step up showing evidence of serious progress, thus resulting in more quality lingusists on the scene...that's the theory anyway.

Anyway here's an interesting video from the European Commission about interpreting.

languages learning interpreting europeancommission

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