Quality Assessment In Simultaneous Interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting (SI) has long been taken as a complicated cognitive and communicative event. Supported by Liu Miqin's comparative investigation of SI activity with Lasswell's communication theory and other interpreting related frameworks such as Daniel Gile's Effort Model and attention split, the present paper attempts to illustrate the complexity of SI process affected by its inherent temporal and capacity constraints, and of simultaneous interpreter's multi-task performance. To further confirm the hypothesis about quality yardsticks in SI, an empirical study was designated and unfolded. Three different groups of people involving SI practitioners, end-users and commissioners as well participated in the questionnaire-based survey. The author endeavors to analyze the data collected both quantitatively and qualitatively. To this end, related SI parameters were also categorized into: rendition of communicative intention in terms of rate of informativeness, completeness and accuracy of sense groups, and intention consistency with the original speaker; and linguistic efficiency of the interpretation in terms of fluency and articulation, timing and voice control, and grammatical correctness so that relative weight of these variables can be graded for establishment of better SI quality assessment model. The implications derived from the study lie in providing empirical support for the fact that more importance is attributed to content-related quality criteria than form-related ones in the multiple task performance; and also shedding light on improvement of interpreting training and assessing methodology as well as the acquisition of specific communicative strategies with the hope to enhance the overall SI quality in the end.