Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.3 Interpreting Quality in the Ears of Different Users
2.3.2 Different Perspectives between Professional Interpreters and General Users
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recordable interpreting output or the entire process of communicative interaction.
2.3.2 Different Perspectives between Professional Interpreters and General Users
When empirical research on interpreting quality started to prosper from the late
1980s, quality studies started from understanding the perspectives of professional
interpreters, but subsequently more studies focused on surveying general end-users or
listeners. Some studies also compared the quality expectations between professional
interpreters and conference participants. Ideally both viewpoints should be considered
simultaneously, and it is still debatable regarding whether it is best to understand
interpreting quality from the perspective of an interpreter or an end-user (Chiaro &
Nocella, 2004). The following sections summarize the quality perceptions of
professional interpreters and interpreting users respectively.
Some of the earlier quality research focused on the perspectives of professional
interpreters. Take Büler’s pioneering empirical study in 1986 for instance. She surveyed
AIIC sponsors, who were all experienced conference interpreters, regarding quality
evaluation standards they consider when endorsing potential candidates for their AIIC
membership. The quality criteria in her work were meant to “reflect the requirements of
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the user as well as the fellow interpreter in a well-balanced mixture” (Büler, 1986, p.
233). She found that linguistic/semantic criteria were considered the most important,
with the criterion of sense consistency with the original message being ranked the
highest among all the criteria. Meanwhile, the extra-linguistic/ pragmatic criteria were
considered desirable, but not essential. In a more recent study by Pöchhacker and
Zwischenberger (2010), they also surveyed AIIC members and confirmed many
findings from Büler’s work. More details are included as below.
Even more interpreting quality studies looked at perspectives from interpreting
users. Kurz (1993) tested Büler’s hypothesis by using eight of Büler’s quality criteria,
but she surveyed three groups of conference attendees, including medical doctors in a
medical conference, engineers in an international conference on quality control, and
delegates at the Council of Europe. There was general agreement by all groups on the
importance/unimportance of some of the quality criteria (e.g. sense consistency with
original message, pleasant voice, and native accent). Meanwhile, there were also many
discrepancies in terms of overall ranking as well as scores attached to individual quality
criterion. For instance, Delegates at the Council of Europe considered the criterion
correct terminology as the most important, giving higher scores than did the two other
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groups. On the surface such a result might be surprising, as one would expect correct
terminology to be considered more important in scientific or medical conferences. But
Kurz (1993) offered a likely explanation, arguing that the delegates at the meetings of
international organizations were used to a specific terminology and thus expected the
interpreters to use those technical jargons that they were most used to and thus were less
tolerant towards any deviations. In addition, because of the shared criteria with Büler’s
earlier study, Kurz could compare the quality expectations of both professional
interpreters and users. She found that while all user groups shared some agreement
when assessing the different quality criteria, the AIIC interpreters in Büler’s study
seemed to demand higher interpreting quality than the participants in Kurz’s research. In
other words, professional interpreters were more stringent and had higher quality
standards than common conference delegates.
Testing the same hypothesis between different user groups and quality expectations,
Moser (1995, 1996) conducted a large-scale study, holding 201 standardized interviews
with end-users at 84 different meetings. The interviewee profile was rather diverse.
They included first-time interpretation service users, meeting participants who only
have limited experienced in using interpretation service, and frequent attendees of
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multilingual conferences with considerable experience of interpretation. Moser also
provided gender and age distribution of the participants. With this large and diverse
interviewee sample, Moser was able to examine the correlation between
conference-going experience and users’ quality expectations. The four quality criteria
categories that he used included faithfulness of interpretation to the original content,
synchronicity, rhetorical skills, and voice. He found that highly experienced users
attributed a much higher weight to the faithfulness to original content criterion than to
the three other criteria. The less experienced conference goers attached similar
importance to all the four criteria. Meanwhile, the newcomers, those respondents who
used interpretation for the first time, valued good rhetorical skills the most. When
comparing the requirement for faithful content across the three user groups, the highly
experienced users valued it more than the less experienced respondents. In addition to
conference-going experience, Moser’s study also looked into quality expectation
differences between different gender and age groups, and yielded interesting findings.
For example, women were more disturbed by lack of synchronicity and more sensitive
to “ums” and “aahs” or other fillers and pauses. Unfortunately, although this research
conducted interviews and open-ended questionnaires, this research did not provide
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explanations for the different quality expectations across different user groups.
Similar to Kurz’s (1993) goal to compare quality criteria importance perceived
between professional interpreters and interpreting users, Ru (1996) surveyed 20
conference interpreters in Taiwan and 166 interpreting users. Respondents were first
asked to rate the importance of seven quality criteria, including pronunciation, fluency
of delivery, coherence, speech rate, faithfulness, professional terminology, and pleasant
voice. Then respondents were given hypothetical scenarios to understand their
expectations towards the function and role of interpreters. An example of a scenario was
“When the speaker talks in a lively intonation, should the interpreter mimic the
speaker’s tone and also deliver an animated rendition?” Ru found that both interpreters
and interpreting users ranked faithfulness as the most important quality criteria,
followed by coherence and fluency of delivery. Both groups also ranked pleasant voice
as the least important criteria. Ru studied the perspectives of interpreters and listeners in
Taiwan, but the findings align with previous studies, showing agreements between the
two groups.
In a more recent study by Pöchhacker and Zwischenberger (2010) that surveyed
AIIC members and yielded 704 responses, it highlighted how socio-demographic and
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professional characteristics of the surveyed interpreters affected their quality
expectations or judgment. These characteristics included gender, age and years working
as a professional interpreter. Generally the survey participants were more demanding for
the form-related quality parameters than for the delivery-related criteria, but the degree
of importance also varied across different meeting types, domains, and individual
preferences or expectations. For example, when tested on two audio samples, one with
lively intonation and the other with monotonous intonation, female interpreters seemed
to be more generous judges than their male counterparts and were more appreciative of
lively intonation.
These studies validated the hypothesis that different user groups have varying
quality perceptions and attach different weights to the various quality criteria. Yet
understanding the quality perceptions of professional interpreters or conference
participants only provide a partial picture of interpreting quality. Some studies argue
that neither professional interpreters nor end-users are capable of making quality
assessment (Chiaro & Nocella, 2004). How should interpreters know what is good for
users, and what users need in the interpreting context? And if we apply the service
concept in business and marketing, since professional interpretation is a kind of service,
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service providers have to understand the needs and satisfaction degree of the service
users (Kotler & Armstrong 1994, as cited in Kurz, 2001). Similarly, do the users know
what is good for them? (Shlesinger, 1997) Moreover, “How can they (users) know for
sure whether the service provided is adequate?” (Garzone, 2002, p. 118). Although
end-users are people who “consume” the interpretation service, they do not know the
source language nor do they know much about interpretation. So an average end-user
might not be the best person to judge whether the interpretation is good or bad. At best,
general users provide their perception of the interpreted texts, which is only one
dimension of the quality paradigm (Kalina, 2002). Because of these limitations, Kalina
(2002) called for a new model that “encompasses the communication situation, the
intentions and knowledge bases of the different actors (including the interpreters), and
any conditions liable to affect the interpreted event” (p. 123-124).