Voices in Refuge at Building Bridges event on 22 May 2025

What feels like 3 days ago was actually 3 weeks ago: Voices in Refuge delegation attending the Building Bridges event, organised by the Centre for Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Leicester, in conjunction with the ITI East Midlands Regional Group.

Barbara Spreiz Dhliwayo, our Head of Training and Development, spoke to the audience of diverse language professionals about the important work of Voices in Refuge in upskilling refugees and migrants through offering free community interpreting training, ethical employment practices, and elevating the state of community interpreting one trained interpreter at a time.

Halima Hamza, our lead trainer and Arabic/French interpreter, and Thomas Tilahun, our Amharic/Tigrinya/Oromo interpreter joined lively discussions about challenges and good practice in community interpreting, and enthused quite a few students to consider community interpreting as a career.

We were very excited to be able to take part in Building Bridges, and have already received several training course applications from participants! Big thank you to Dr Yan Ying and Dr Sara Naylor for inviting us to speak. We look forward to coming back again next year.