About Foundations, and our New Look

The Foundations of Interpreting Processes series, led by Betty Colonomos, has been a living and evolving program for over 30 years. Many people return to Foundations to explore their own understanding of interpreting more deeply. While the content and the educational environment based on interaction and dialogue feel familiar, the Foundations experience continues to feel fresh and new. Some might remember the 1992 teleclass, Processes in Interpreting and Transliterating: making them work for you, which still strikes viewers as timeless and relevant. Countless people have taken modules in this series again and again, and each time they come to new discoveries and new insights. Foundations stands unique among educational opportunities available to interpreters.

In alignment with its continuing evolution, the Foundations of Interpreting Processes series is taking on a new look. The new image represents the series, with discrete elements connected by a continuous flowing path around them. The Foundations of Interpreting Processes series builds upon itself from module to module. Learners in Foundations also know that they can return to previous modules at any time to focus on particular aspects of their interpreting work. Many of us are used to courses of study that proceed in one direction: after enrolling in the first part, the learner moves on to the second, then to the third, and so on, never to return to the first part. Foundations takes a spiraling progression: the path a learner takes is more fluid and self-directed, where learners can—and often do—return to previous modules as they move forward in their learning. 

The Foundations series has a new image, and the names of the Foundations modules have changed as well. The new module names help to describe the interrelation of the parts to each other, and to the whole. 

In Foundations: Framework, Parts A and B, we explore the Integrated Model of Interpreting, and we practice working with it to see how having a framework helps us to organize our beliefs and experiences with interpreting into a cohesive whole. We might also discover areas of our interpreting that we have yet to explore! While each of the parts stands alone, it is really each of these parts together that help us to develop a robust framework that we can carry into our daily work.

In Foundations: Tools, Parts A and B, we expand upon our tools for analyzing our interpreting and deepening our understanding. Again, each of these modules stands alone, but we work across both of them to gain comfort and facility with these new tools.

In Foundations: Managing we explore the decisions and prioritization that interpreters must make rapidly while working, and we uncover strategies that we have been using intuitively, and develop additional ones that we might use. 

In Foundations: Integrating, we bring all of the elements that we have explored together and we explore the greatest challenge of all: simultaneous interpreting. 

We hope you like our new look!

Click here to see detailed descriptions for each seminar in the series.