A Validation Study Of Levels Of Typical Liaison Interpreting Activities Based On The Interpreting Scale Of China's Standards Of English Language Ability

At present,in the field of interpreting teaching,the curriculum design usually needs to be combined with different fields and scenes of interpreting activities.However,the academic community's understanding of typical interpreting activities is not sufficient,the combination of interpreting scenes and market is not close enough,and the difficulty levels of interpreting activities in teaching materials are not well discriminated,which affect the effect of interpreting teaching.In 2018,the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission officially published the China's Standards of English Language Ability,among which the Interpreting Scale and the Translation Scale are creatively included.The interpreting ability in the Interpreting Scale is reflected by interpreting activities of different fields,scenes and levels,which provides the foundation for further exploring the interpreting activities.In addition,in the field of interpreting teaching and interpreting service,liaison interpreting plays an important role.On this basis,this research aims to explore the typical scenes of liaison interpreting activities and validate the appropriateness of the classification of typical liaison interpreting activities,so as to provide a reference for the revision of descriptors concerning liaison interpreting activities in the Interpreting Scale and promote its application in interpreting teaching,learning and assessment.The whole research procedure consists of two phases.In the first phase,the typical scenes of liaison interpreting activities in China's context are identified while in the latter one,Item Response Theory of language testing is introduced to validate difficulty grading in order to distinguish different levels of interpreting competence,reflecting on indicators of item measure,item outfit,item separation index,as well as the item map.Based on this,this study proposes the following two research questions: 1)What are the typical scenes of liaison interpreting activities based on the Interpreting Scale of CSE? 2)How well the levels of typical liaison interpreting activities are classified?In order to answer the two research questions,both quantitative and qualitative study are conducted.To be specific,literature,questionnaire survey,and interview are used in this research.For the research question 1,236 respondents are involved in the data collected,who are BTI students,MTI students,MA students,professional interpreters as well as interpreting teachers.Based on the principle of selection,that is the mean value should be greater than or equal to 3,17 interpreting scenes of liaison interpreting activities are identified.In order to answer the research question 2,another round of questionnaire is distributed.In the end,137 questionnaires are handed in.In this period,Rasch analysis is conducted to answer the question.According to the results,the mean of outfit Mnsq is.98,which means data well fit the model.The item separation is 4.38,which means the 17 items can be classified into 4 levels.The levels of typical liaison interpreting activities are well classified compared with the original number of levels in the interpreting scales of CSE,that is 3.For the 3 descriptors whose difficulty level is higher than the original one,the researcher uses interview to explore the factors that may affect the interviewees' understanding of the descriptors,and suggestions for the revision of the descriptors are also obtained.According to the research result,it is found that the description of descriptors is too general.It is suggested that attention should be paid to refining the content of descriptors,including adjectives,adverbs,verbs,and nouns,and the relation between interpreting performance and the corresponding ability level when revising the descriptors.From the theoretical perspective,this study clarifies the concept of liaison interpreting,which is helpful to deepen the understanding of typical liaison interpreting activities and their difficulty levels,and to promote the application of the interpreting autonomous learning theory in interpreting teaching.Practically speaking,by defining the typical liaison interpreting activities and their difficulty levels,the practice of interpreting teaching can be standardized to some extent,the integration of interpreting teaching and market demand for interpreting can be further promoted,and guidance for interpreting learns' and interpreting teachers' practice can also be provided.In the end,as a part of the validation of the Interpreting Scale of China's Standards of English Language Ability,this study can further promote the validation of the Scale and its application in interpreting teaching,learning and assessment.