Abstract :
[en] The Pursuit of Quality in Interpreter Training
Today's trainee interpreters are tomorrow's professionals. Therefore the training they receive is an essential part of their being ready for the professional interpreting market.
Quality is a central component of this training. Presumably, during class, a trainer's feedback on a student's performance reflects what the trainer considers a quality interpreting performance to be. In other words, the trainer's comments serve to guide the student towards producing a quality performance.
Equally, the student's performance is presumably the reflection of what they consider a quality performance to be, to the extent that the skills they possess at that stage of their training allow them to achieve this target.
Quality in interpreting has been described as an elusive concept by Shlesinger and it surely is when we think about it in very general terms. Shlesinger asks the question 'Quality for whom?' and it is true that if we do not know who the judge of quality is and what their expectations are, it is difficult to realistically have any hope of meeting these unknown quality expectations.
The definition of quality can vary from context to context and for this reason, this piece of research is firmly situated in the classroom context. More specifically, the focus is on the teaching of consecutive retour interpreting at the Faculté de Traduction et d'Interprétation at the University of Mons, Belgium. As far as the author knows, little research has been done into improving quality in the teaching of retour interpreting. From previous research carried out by the author, it would seem that this kind of research could prove useful to teaching and to the profession as a whole. It seems reasonable to expect that, in order to allow for swift progression towards their common goal, trainees and trainers would benefit from a common definition of quality in retour interpreting..
Following in the footsteps of Buhler's 1986 study on quality criteria, the first part of this research will attempt to find out what importance trainers and trainee interpreters attach to specific quality criteria when teaching or carrying out consecutive retour interpreting, respectively, in the classroom context. The results of the two groups (trainees and trainers) will be compared in order to ascertain whether they attach equal importance to the same criteria.
