Comparison of the Present Study’s Findings with Jiang’s

The survey and interview results reflected some of the potential differences between student and professional interpreters’ glossaries. To begin with, most (42.6%) of the professionals in Jiang’s study would build a glossary for every assignment, whereas most (43.6%) of the sample of this study would build one only for classes with unfamiliar or technical content. Professionals tend to build a glossary for every meeting probably because meetings nowadays are becoming highly

technical. They need the glossary to familiarize themselves with a variety of jargons and subject matters. Student interpreters, on the other hand, do not always face difficult content in class. Class materials are oftentimes carefully selected and their difficulty controlled by instructors. Students may choose not to build a glossary for classes with more familiar content.

5.2.2 Glossary medium

With regard to glossary medium, most (50%) of the sample of this study preferred to use either Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, while loose paper stood out as the most popular medium in Jiang’s study. As Jiang suggested, experts chose paper as their preferred medium because they needed accurate, handy, and timely retrieval of glossary items at work, which would be made difficult with a large electronic file. For student interpreters, however, it is the process of building the glossary that matters and provides a sense of security. From the subjects’ responses, one finds that whether the glossary could come in useful in class mattered not so much as whether it was built in the first place. With the glossary, the subjects felt that they have adequately prepared for the class and felt psychologically assured.

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However, once students move closer to real-life settings, a glossary may have different meanings for them. For example, a few interviewees mentioned that in practicum sessions, the final product becomes important and has to be useful at work.

Glossaries for practicum sessions may have to be more detailed (S3), more accurate (S8), and shorter (S19).

5.2.3 Glossary content

Professionals’ need to quickly access items at work also contributes to

differences in glossary content between experts and students. In Jiang’s study, most of the subjects included bilingual items (e.g. acronyms and technical terms) in their glossary. Yet, the subjects of the present study included more than bilingual items in their glossaries—definitions, collocations, parallel texts, notes, and so forth. For students, while the glossary could bring online help in class, they also see the glossary as a learning database that stores whatever information that is helpful to their learning.

Once again, the glossary-making process takes primacy over the final product for students.

5.2.4 Glossary reuse

As for glossary reuse, most (65.4%) of the subjects of the present study only sometimes reused their glossaries, but most of the sample in Jiang’s study would either always (51.7%) or sometimes (44.7%) reuse their glossaries. This is probably because professionals tend to encounter conferences with similar subject matter in their career, while students are often exposed to a variety of subject matters intentionally selected by instructors. It would be less likely for students to reuse previous glossaries if they had to encounter new topics every class.

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5.2.5 The role of teamwork

In Jiang’s study, 47.3% of the subjects demonstrated professional solidarity by always voluntarily sharing their glossaries. However, most (71%) of the subjects in this study would share theirs only when being requested by classmates. More than half (54.2%) rarely had the experience of building a joint glossary with classmates. As discussed previously in this chapter, this may be because interpreting mostly remains a solitary activity in the classroom. For both CI and SI, students have to do it alone.

The limited time for class preparation also reduces the likelihood for the entire class to coordinate schedule, align the format and content, and build a joint glossary that would be of use to everyone. Last but not least, if the process of glossary making matters more than the final product, making a glossary on one’s own would make more sense than freeloading others’ fruits of hard work.

5.2.6 The role of expert consultation

The role of expert consultation also differed between the two groups.

Professionals tend to value the opinions of experts/delegates (Jiang, 2013) as a source of the glossary. However, the majority (39.6%) of the subjects of this study never consulted experts as a source of their glossaries. The reason may be that students often do not have real speakers in class, reducing the likelihood for briefing sessions to take place. Professional interpreters, on the other hand, are more likely to have access to experts and conference delegates. Second, as quite a few of the subjects cited time pressure of preparation, they may find it time-consuming to seek opinions from experts in various fields before class. To bridge the gap, instructors could assume the role of the speaker and take students’ questions, as instructors know very well the materials to be interpreted.

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5.2.7 The job-specific nature of the glossary

The final point worth exploring here is the job-specific nature of the glossary, touched on in Jiang’s working definition of the interpreter’s glossary. As discussed in Chapter 2, experts’ glossaries could not always be depended on for use in conferences other than the one they were prepared for (Gile, 2009). This may hold true for

students when they build glossaries for a specific interpreting class. If instructors provide students with materials that they have worked on before, some of the glossary items would indeed be job-specific. However, not all of the subjects’ glossaries were job-oriented. The results of Q1-8 showed that unlike professionals, more than half of the subjects would build glossaries not intended for a specific interpreting class. Such glossaries included two categories: glossaries for a specific domain/category (52.8%) and non-domain-specific glossaries (57.5%). Glossary-building of such nature was mostly self-initiated, as foreign language learners autonomously adopt list-learning as a strategy. Those who built those glossaries went the extra mile to curate terms during their course of study, and these terms would eventually make up a corpus that learners deem would benefit them in the long run. The subjects’ responses also showed that they were generally aware of the differences between glossaries for in-class and non-class-specific purposes.

The two kinds of non-class-specific glossaries could potentially serve a long-term purpose and deserve more attention in the interpreting classroom. Compared to glossaries for a specific interpreting class, non-class-specific glossaries are the fruits of students’ autonomous learning. Over time, they keep track of students’ learning progress and ultimately form the knowledge and linguistic base that support

interpreting. For example, if students encounter similar fields in the future, they could go back and review their ready-made domain-specific glossaries, which would save them the time and effort to start preparing for a subject matter all over again.

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domain-specific glossaries, as some interviewees commented, could equip students with the variety of expression that will benefit them in their professional career. In short, for interpreting students, glossaries could be both mission-specific and helpful in the long-term at the same time.

5.2.8 Issues pertaining to expertise development

At this stage, it can be established that the usefulness of the interpreter’s glossary has both short-term and long-term components to it. For novice interpreters, as

suggested by the findings of the present survey, it is the process of making the glossary that matters. The final product may be of use online, but not all of the subjects would consult the glossary in class. A few interviewees even said that they would put items into the glossary knowing that the items would not be helpful on the spot. What’s more, the fact that quite a few of the subjects would build glossaries not for a specific interpreting class also suggests that glossaries may serve as a learning database that can benefit them over the long haul. For novice interpreters, the long-term component of glossary enjoys equal if not more weight than the short-long-term component. The long-term component would fit into the long-term preparation for one’s interpreting career.

On the other hand, the expert interpreter’s glossary is more job-specific in nature, which is mentioned in Jiang’s definition of the interpreter’s glossary. For experts, quick and in-time accessibility of items at work is of utmost concern, and the glossary they compile for work could not always be depended on for use in conferences other than the one they were prepared for (Gile, 2009). For experts, the short-term

component of glossary use stands out.

However, this does not mean that experts have overlooked or skipped the long-term component of interpreting preparation. As discussed in Chapter 2, experts have

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wide experience of working in various domains and accumulate domain-specific knowledge over their career. With such knowledge buildup, experts are able to adopt more global plans, whereas novices tend to adopt microcontextual plans (Moser-Mercer et al., 2000). What’s more, experts have more comprehensive knowledge than novices due to more exposure to many domains and can establish better connections between them (Moser-Mercer, 1997). Therefore, the accumulation of knowledge does distinguish experts from their novice counterparts.

Clearly, what sets student interpreters’ glossary apart from experts’ is its long-term efficacies. Jiang (2013) suggested that students build up domain knowledge spanning the topics they work on at school. This has already been done by many of the subjects of the study, who incorporated long-term components into their glossaries for class by including items that they thought could be useful again in the future. They also built non-class-specific glossaries in various domains as a corpus of some sort.

It can now be said that glossary building is an ever-evolving process for student interpreters and has profound implications for their expertise development. When at school, the long-term component of glossary making stands out for students, while they also have to make their glossaries useful for each interpreting class. Gradually, student interpreters accumulate, along with elevated expertise levels, the language and knowledge over time through repeated glossary-building and working on various subject domains. When finally at work, either in practicum sessions or the real world, they can focus more on the technical content of a given assignment that would take up a large part of preparation. The short-term components of glossary-making will then feature more prominently.

For student interpreters, the long-term efficacies of the glossary are manifested on both linguistic and knowledge levels. On the linguistic level, students can

transform some of the terms they encounter at school into “cement-like basket

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vocabulary” (Brisau et al., 1994, p. 88) by focusing on the long-term components of glossary making. In the long run, they will do a better job at lexical processing and accessing lexical information, as Liu (2009) suggested. On the knowledge level, Gile (2002) reckoned that previous accumulated knowledge may equip students with knowledge that they can use later in the profession. Eventually, like their expert counterparts, students will be able to establish “links among related concepts in different domains, and consequently faster access to that knowledge” (Moser-Mercer, 1997, p. 257).