Simultaneous Interpreting Users’ Quality Evaluation And Fluency

Quality of interpretation services is evaluated by users, in terms of their satisfaction. It is, therefore, very important and necessary to enhance the understanding of user needs and expectations of criteria for the quality of interpretation. Fluency, as one of the criteria, becomes the object of this study. This research is based on three hypotheses. Hypothesis1: Fluency has strong impact on users’ satisfaction of interpretation; Hypothsis2: Fluency has influence on users’ ovulation of other quality criteria; Hypothesis3: Users with different experience of interpretation service, education background and sexuality have different expectation of fluency. A controlled experiment is taken, which measures54simultaneous interpreting users’ perceptions of the quality of two different simultaneous interpretations, which only differ in fluency; as well as a survey designed to describe the expectations of54users for fluency. Statistic Package for Social Science (SPSS) and Excel are used for data processing. The results of this study indicate that interpretation with lower fluency is assigned lower quality ratings on user satisfaction; as well as other quality criteria, such as accuracy and completeness. Most of the Simultaneous interpreting users consider fluency as an important criteria; however, differences exist between experienced and inexperienced users for their expectations of fluency, as well as among users with different academic backgrounds. Qualitative data also elucidate that there exist differences, along with coherence, between users’ expectations and users’ responses. Moreover, this study provides with a discussion of the concept of fluency.