A Study Of Output Standards For Professional And Non-professional Interpreters

This thesis explores appropriate standards of interpretation output. Methodologically, we implement text study and experiment study, and respectively propose interpretation standards for professional interpretation practitioners and non-professional interpreters. The main focus of this thesis is to discuss non-professional interpreters’output quality, possible working field and output standards. The theoretical meaning of this study is to highlight the necessity of the output standard research for non-professional interpreters; the practical meaning is to optimize the standards for professional interpreters and, more importantly, to study and consequently construct a standard for non-professional interpreters.The composition of the thesis is as follows:firstly, we take the standards of the interpretation organizations (e.g. FIT, AIIC, ITI, CATTI etc.) and the theories of interpretation scholars (e.g. D. Seleskovitch, M. Lederer, H. Biihler, D. Gile etc.) as references. We analyze and adjust the theories before proposing more detailed and exact standards for professional interpreters. Then, we focus on the study on the output standard research of non-professional interpreters, which is the difficult point of the whole thesis. We had an experiment with8non-professional interpreters to have case studies in which we prove the acceptability and quality of non-professional interpreters’output. Through the entire process, we did recording and word-by-word note-taking in terms of interpretation delivery and audience reactions that are carefully analyzed afterwards. Based on the study of the data, we put forward practical standards for non-professional interpreters. In the final part, we suggest trainings for professional and non-professional interpreters to meet relevant standards.Two main fruits have been achieved in this thesis:detailed standards for professional interpreters and the framework of the interpretation output standards for non-professional interpreters. We expect that future researchers improve the interpretation output standards for non-professional interpreters and develop the theory of interpretation output standards.