Quality Assessment In Consecutive Interpreting

Interpreting has been an indispensible part of global communication, and the discussion about its quality assessment has always been a topic of debates. Based on the literature review of various empirical studies conducted by western scholars, and the theoretical guidance of interpreting and communication studies, the present paper attempts to illustrate the consecutive interpreting process, its communicative nature and the role played by interpreting practitioners in CI. After the theoretical analysis, the author conducted an empirical study, in which the related CI parameters were subsequently categorized into:efforts to unpack the communicative intention and message of the speaker with criteria including completeness and accuracy of message, terminology and knowledge of field concerned, cohesion ties and logicalness of expression, pragmatic appropriateness and adaptability; and efforts to maintain linguistic and appearance perfection with criteria including fluency and articulation, grammatical correctness, intonation and voice control. By rating and ranking the importance of given parameters according to their influence to the communicative intentions from the questionnaires-based survey, the CI quality assessment model shall be bettered. The implications derived from the study lies in providing empirical support for the fact that more importance shall be attached to interpreter's competence to unpack the communicative intentions of the speaker, rather than simply focusing on his/her capability to bring out the linguistic and grammatical perfection, and also shedding light on improvement of interpreting training with cultivating interpreter's capacity to transfer communicative intentions in mind.