A Study On Quality Assessment For Academic Interpretation

This thesis takes quality assessment of academic interpretation as the research subject and draws upon achievements and research findings both at home and abroad. With narrowed research scope of academic interpretation and a view to improvement, this author makes an analysis on there assessment models intended for three different purposes put forward by Moser-Mercer (1996) and introduces new elements—prepared manuscript of speech and pre-translated text, into the assessment system. Then this author makes according suggestions to the three assessment modes and expatiates upon their relevance and significance in quality assessment of academic interpretation. Later in this thesis, the author focus the attention on the key element in translation assessment—fidelity in meaning and analyze it from a communicative and user-oriented point of view. With a view to quantifying fidelity in academic interpretation, the author takes Gile's qualitative analysis on fidelity assessment model (1996) and Cai Xiaohong's perceptions on quantitative measurements of information unit and information structure as theoretical reference, and suggests an operable assessment model by combining the strong points of these two approaches. Moreover, this author also deliberates on the practical application method. In the end, this author states the limitations of this model and reminds people of the fact that it will take years in trial-and-error practice before we can finally determine each assessment parameters and their values. Finally, this author hopes this thesis could provide some food for thought in the long-term effort in developing a universal interpretation assessment standard which can be instrumental in applications like professional interpretation, lab research and interpretation training program.