The dreaded “rentrée”

In France you can’t escape from noticing that the “rentrée” is well and truly upon us – there are adverts everywhere for ready-meals, backpacks, new furniture. If you try to go to the supermarket good luck getting past the “Kinder bus” or finding actual food behind the never-ending aisles of every type of paper you can imagine! Yes, the “rentrée” – French for “back to school” is upon us for us freelancers too as the summer is well and truly over.

My summer was filled with practice weeks – another year of Leeds EN IT and WISE as well as separately organised groups with friends to really hone our skills and prepare for the next busy season ahead of us. But, all this practising was so great that it really made me wish it was easier to continue meeting new people to give/get feedback from/to! Don’t fret though – there are of course solutions to this!

I’m sure that most of you have already heard of Interpretimebank – which I’m a big fan of (check out their site here, as well as IBPG (Interpreters in Brussels Practice Group) which runs throughout the year.

This summer I also learnt of a new initiative aptly-named RIP – Remote Interpreting Practice which this very cool logo:

The group is run by Louise Reynaud who is based in Lyon and it’s a group of interpreters she knows who put their free slots into a Doodle to then book in practice slots via Appear.in - an online conference room (check the site out here). The idea is to work together on consecutive speeches - the results of simultaneous practice remotely not yet being sufficient. This is a brilliant idea that I can’t wait to try out this week, and it’s something that we could all have a go at within our networks, and networks of networks.

Do you know of any other practice groups? Do you want to keep up your practice after the summer of CPD? Reach out to the people you met at WISE or Leeds EN IT or other initiatives and why not keep the practice going!