Becoming an Interpreter: Assessment and Self-Assessment in Untutored Practice Sessions

ABSTRACT Practice, needless to say, is of paramount importance in becoming a successful conference interpreter. As pointed out by numerous scholars, the acquisition of interpreting skills by trainees requires not only professional guidance during classes, but also extensive outside these hours. The effectiveness of sessions greatly depends on the students' own assessment skills as well as on their peers' ability to give meaningful feedback. While the feedback received in class from course trainers ranks first in terms of relevance and objectiveness, it also sets the standards of quantitative and qualitative assessment, giving trainees the cognitive and methodological tools they need in order to properly judge their performance and improve on their technique. This paper sets out to analyze, by the means of questionnaires submitted to conference interpreting trainees in six different EMCI programs, the way in which these assessment and self-assessment techniques are applied during untutored sessions as well as the overall efficiency of peer feedback. Furthermore, we shall also look into alternate methods of increasing the efficiency of sessions such as using standardized assessment grids like the ones that we conceived and tested during our own sessions, at the EMCI program in Cluj. KEYWORDS: interpreter training, feedback, peer evaluation, selfassessment, group work Assessment and, more importantly, self-assessment are indispensable to all interpreters concerned with the quality of their own work and are doubtlessly essential to trainee-interpreters who need to actively acquire and improve on their interpreting skills. During course classes trainers are able to accurately point out students' mistakes and indicate pertinent solutions to various technique issues. Course trainers also actively shape students' assessment and self-assessment skills by introducing them to interpreting assessment patterns from the very beginning of the program. These patterns, ever more demanding and strict with the passage of time, are supposed to be adopted and applied by trainees not only in class but also during untutored sessions for the sake of efficiency and relevance. Does that really happen? How are sessions really perceived by conference interpreting students? How often do they meet to practice? Do they give meaningful feedback to each other? Are they able to take criticism and put it to constructive use if it doesn't come from course-trainers but from their peers? What value to they really attach to peer-feedback? Are they aware of deliberate practice strategies? Do they use them? This paper strives to answer all of these questions by the means of a survey submitted to thirty students enrolled, in May 2010, in six different conference interpreting programs, all of them members of the European Masters in Conference Interpreting consortium: Ecole de traduction et d'interpretation Geneva, Ecole Superieure de Traduction et d'Interpretation Paris, Conference Interpreting Techniques Westminster, Master's in Conference Interpreting La Laguna, Master's in Conference Interpreting Copenhagen and the European Master's in Conference Interpreting Cluj. Through a close analysis of survey results, we identified several potentially dangerous issues encountered by students during their sessions: decreased efficiency, tendency to give irrelevant feedback, the occasional hurt feelings on account of unduly delivered feedback as well as lower credibility attached to feedback coming from fellow students and we thought that a possible solution to most of these problems might be the usage of a standardized feedback form: the assessment and self-assessment grids. Their role is to maximize feedback-objectivity and to allow students to accurately track their own progress throughout their entire training. Quality assessment in conference interpreting Conference interpreting is eminently a means of assuring communication between the speaker and message recipients. …