A Survey Report On The Comparison Of The Quality Assessment Of Interpreting Between Professional Interpreters And Users

Up to now, interpreting is more of a social activity with the commercial featuresthan a transformation course of information in an academic sense. The developmentof the world along with global economic integration increases the demand on thenumber of interpreting activities. Interpreting industry has entered the era ofprofessionalism. Therefore, relevant regulations and rules are needed to assess thequality of interpreting. However, previous researches are mainly based on theexperience of professional interpreters. What we need more now is the feedback andcomments from users. There are two goals in conducting this survey. One is todedicate the result to professional interpreters for reference, so that they could adjusttheir interpreting strategies and serve users better. The other is to present the result toMTI students or universities in order that they could accordingly adjust the curriculumand teaching model and MTI students could be more aware of the demands by theinterpreting users and optimize their learning strategies in order to improve theirinterpreting ability, which will lay a solid foundation for their future development.Therefore, the author designed the survey report, aiming at obtaining moreinformation about quality assessment of interpreting from the users as well as thedifference of the response from users and professional interpreters. The authorselected2groups of people as the survey subject, namely, over60professionalinterpreters who at least have3-year working experience and almost140users whofrequently employ professional interpreters. The method of survey mainly involvestwo individual questionnaires and proper interview. The result is displayed in words,graph or bar chart after calculation and analysis. Because of the character differenceof the two groups of people, it is natural that what they focus on is different in qualityassessment. Therefore, through the survey, the difference in their response is clear tosee. After the collection, sorting out and analysis of the data, the author divided all thequestions into2categories: ones on linguistic aspect and others on non-linguisticaspect. The data analysis shows that the two groups have much disagreement on thetwo aspects. To be specific, on linguistic aspect, interpreting users demand more onthe correctness of grammar and terms than professional interpreters and onnon-linguistic aspect, users demand more on outputting voice and neutrality ofinterpreters than interpreters themselves. The difference indicates that the2groups ofpeople focus on different issues. Therefore, interpreters should adjust theirinterpreting strategies properly on the2aspects and find an access to meet the demandby users while guaranteeing the quality of interpreting. MTI students, in their dailypractice, should also take into account the demand by users and improve theinterpreting competence on all-round aspects and pave the road for future career.