A Comparative Study Of Quality Assessment Strategies Between Interpreters And Users In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpretation

The growing market of interpretation in recent decades has brought a spring of new researches in interpretation quality assessment.Many market evaluation and education institutions put their attention mainly on the user assessment criteria.A lot of researches has been made to analyze the composition of user assessment system.What are the differences between interpreters and users in quality assessment?How to cope with changing market demands?These questions cause discussion not only among universities,but also among translation firms and professional translators.This paper is based on a test on English to Chinese interpreting.Within a designed circumstance,professional translators and users are invited to to evaluate the performance of an interpreter in the same space at the same time.Results are collected through surveys and analyzed with statistical methods.The purpose is to evaluate the differences and similarities between the interpreters and users.In consecutive interpretation,interpreters are directly exposed to audiences.They provide both visual and acoustical services.Thus,the assessment criterion is also influenced by this complicated circumstance.Former researches believes that interpreters and users apply reliable,coherent and repeatable framework for evaluation,but there is no sound evidence.In this paper,the author tries to evaluate the stability of the two groups in terms of interpreting quality assessment.Hopefully,this will provide a new perspective for later researches.