User Expectations In Interpreting Quality Evaluation

With the rapid development of interpreting studies, interpreting quality evaluation has caught more and more scholars' eyes. Consequently, since the late 1980s, user expectation research has become an important component of studies on interpreting quality evaluation.With an introduction of some basic concepts regarding user expectations and interpreting quality evaluation, and with a review of related user expectation surveys, this thesis aims to provide a relatively systematic introduction and analysis of users' (mainly listeners') expectations for the interpreters' services, and to explore the enlightenment brought by and the problems of these empirical studies.Chapter One introduces some basic concepts concerning user expectations, interpreting quality and interpreting quality evaluation, and provides readers with a general idea of the close relationship between user expectations and interpreting quality evaluation.Chapter Two focuses on users' (mainly the listeners') expectations for the interpreted speech. On the one hand, the empirical studies indicate that some consensus has been reached by users on what makes up a good interpretation and that users usually attach greater importance to the content than to the form of interpretation. On the other hand, the analysis of empirical studies on user expectations reveals that there are still some problems with these user studies: the comparability among individual studies is low; the questionnaires used in user surveys have not been unified; the definitions of quality criteria adopted in questionnaires are ambiguous; the findings of these empirical studies may not berepresentative of other interpreting events.