Chartered Institute
of Linguists
NEWS & VOICES
The CIOL Code of Professional Conduct
The CIOL Code of Professional Conduct
The principles of honour and sustainable business practices originated in Europe in Italian and North German trading centres around the 12th century and were embodied by the figure of the ‘honourable merchant’ who could sleep peacefully knowing they had done honest...
When I first received my Masters in Interpreting, I was very proud of myself for completing a challenging course. But I wrongly assumed that a Masters would be enough to cover any kind of work that I might want to do.
I moved to the UK in 1997 to study and had just started my first publishing role in 2002. Although I liked my job, I knew I wanted to use my language skills in future—perhaps on a freelance basis. So, I decided to look into good translation courses and recommended qualifications.
I quickly realised that the CIOLQ DipTrans...
By Stephen Doswell
Income (both rates of pay and getting paid). Competition. Quality. Technology. These are uppermost among challenges facing language professionals according to the latest CIOL Insights report on the Languages Professions, published August 2022*. Indeed, three years on from a similar survey, CIOL concludes that these concerns have grown since 2019 as a...
"As Chair of CIOL Council I am really delighted to see CIOL Voices coming to life."
As linguists we all have things to say and it is important that members can share their experiences in their own words. We won’t always agree on everything, but as a community I have generally found that we value and respect diversity of expression as part of our...
Does being a Chartered Linguist really matter?
This is a question that maybe many ask; why is it important to have such a title?
I remember many years ago - to be precise 12 years ago - when I embarked on the journey of becoming an interpreter, that I was looking for an accountant for my self-assessment tax return. Yes, I know many people do this on...
Historically, and for standard use, language has been expressed as four language ‘skills’ which are, alphabetically, Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing. More frequently, Government and universities in the UK and internationally order the four skills by the passive/receptive, active/productive pairings of Listening and Speaking, Reading and Writing....
It’s an age-old question. Well maybe not age-old actually, but it has been a question since at least 1954, when the authors of a Georgetown–IBM Machine Translation demo – with an IBM701 mainframe computer, using a rules-based system and an operator punching Romanised Russian sentences onto cards – confidently predicted that Machine Translation (MT) would be solved within the...
Some of the work done by the Institute of Fiscal Studies on the impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings makes for sobering reading for linguists. Their report from a couple of years ago, for instance, suggested that the discounted average lifetime total returns for women in arts and humanities subjects such as creative arts, languages, and philosophy were negative or near-...