Differences Of Quality Assessment Criteria Between Simultaneous Interpreting And Consecutive Interpreting

This paper aims at a comparative study of the quality assessment criteria-related disparity between simultaneous interpreting (SI) and consecutive interpreting (CI), two most popular forms of interpreting both at international and community level. This author uses theoretical resources from cognitive psychology, including key concepts like attention, processing capacity, amongst others, to support Gile's Effort Models for both SI and CI which give a stage-by-stage account of interpreting activity by dividing the process of interpreting into different, closely interrelated stages otherwise unlinked to each other, which co-occur with a set sequence for incoming audio segments of source language speech. Having grasped a clear understanding of interpreters' processing capacity limitation and requirement under the two dissimilar interpreting circumstances, namely SI and CI, this author leads the dissertation further into the analysis of a set of general quality assessment criteria for interpreting, with the intention of assessing the performance of SI and CI with priorities given to different items vulnerable to processing capacity changes. This is a result of the conflict between interpreter's available processing capacity and the requirement imposed by the interpreting mission in either a simultaneous or a consecutive way. The relationship between available and needed mental resources is the ultimate reason for interpreter's underperformance problems and, further, the differentiation in criteria-related assessment.