Consecutive Interpreting Quality Evaluation: A Case Study

Interpreting, as a communicational bridge among people with different culturalbackgrounds, gained huge momentum in the past decades. Studies and researches oninterpreting, which is seen as a process as well as a product, mushroomed. Althoughstudies on interpreting quality came along with the emergence of interpretiveactivities, the possibility and necessity of establishing a set of criteria for interpretingquality evaluation that are universally recognized are still left to be decided. Thisthesis believes that it is of great importance to establish an objective and feasibleevaluation method, which can be used by interpreting trainees to assess a specificinterpreting performance or used to record performance in a long run, find weaklinks and track progress.The evaluation method in this thesis is mainly based on Cai Xiaohong’sevaluation equation: Interpreting Quality=Faithfulness*50%+Accuracy*15%+Delivery Fluency*15%+Strategy Use*20%. However, the criteria for eachparameter are questioned by its vaguely defined scoring criteria for each parameter.In this thesis, these criteria are narrowed down to structure accuracy, informationcompleteness, terminology correctness, grammatical correctness, and overallevaluation of delivery fluency and strategy use.This equation was used to evaluate performances of5student interpreters toprove its feasibility. And based on the scoring chart, we believe that grammaticalaccuracy and terminology interpretation are the major problems keeping studentsfrom good performances, and these problems can be avoided by a thorough pre-taskpreparation.