Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.3 Expertise in Interpreting
In order to figure out objective criteria for an expert interpreter, previous
studies attempted to identify concrete strategies or traits found among
experienced interpreters which allow them to continuously deliver quality
performances, and consequently use the traits as criteria as the definition of
expert interpreter. Currently, amount of experience is often used to evaluate
an interpreter’s skills and competency (Ericsson, 2000; AIIC, n.d.). In terms
of delivery quality, fluency and accuracy are two of the basic requirements and
commonly used during output evaluation (藍順德、劉敏華、張嘉倩、陳子瑋、
林慶隆、吳紹銓，2007). However, it should be noted that above mentioned
factors are commonly used, but not definite. Some researches propose skill
acquisition procedures (Anderson, 1995), and some further combine skill level
models with interpreting pedagogy (汝明麗，2010), in an attempt to observe
“expert traits” through the learning and maturing process of interpreting
students. Other areas discussed in order to find the difference between novice
and experienced interpreters include input information processing
(Moser-Mercer, 1997), knowledge structure (Kuenzli & Moser-Mercer, 1995),
strategy employment (Moser-Mercer, 1997; Mayer, 1992; Lambert, 2004;
Moser-Mercer, Frauenfelder, Casado, & Künzli, 2000).
According to Moser-Mercer (1997), an interpreting and translation student
may call themselves an expert of certain degree once they had finished their
training and received diplomas. However, years of field experience are still
required for the individual to become an established professional. As
mentioned before, it will take at least ten years for an individual to become an
expert on average; yet in the field of interpreting, so far there is no consensus
on the exact criteria of an expert interpreter, let alone the amount of time
required to reach expert level. Evaluating expertise in interpreting can be
quite challenging. Unless an interpreter mistranslates the message or makes
obvious language mistakes, it is difficult to objectively judge an interpretation
as “good” or “bad”, and currently the judging and scoring of interpretation
deliveries mostly rely on the professionalism of seasoned professional
interpreters (藍順德、劉敏華、張嘉倩、陳子瑋、林慶隆、吳紹銓，2007). This
problem is similar in certain areas, such as creative professions, where
measuring expertise would arouse many challenges. For example, the nature
of some expertise makes it impossible to recreate performances in an
experimental environment, let alone scientifically measure the results.
Nevertheless, Ericsson, Prietula, and Cokely (2007) stated that modified
testing methods still exist, and results are in line with especially the experts’
technical proficiency. For most interpreting examinations and evaluations,
accuracy and fluency are always among the grading criteria (藍順德、劉敏華、
張嘉倩、陳子瑋、林慶隆、吳紹銓，2007). It shows that there two are the
technical aspects of interpreting, and can be measured. In this study, the
interpreting deliveries of both novices (from Huang’s research) and
experienced interpreters would be graded in terms of accuracy and fluency in
order to determine the quality of output.
Besides the two criteria mentioned above, currently there have not been any
other universal criteria for evaluating different levels of interpreting expertise,
although studies attempting to find some criteria have been continuously
conducted. Kurz (2001) studied interpreting delivery quality from a user’s
point of view. The research revealed that although there has been plenty of
data collected from previous studies, they still lacked coordination and
interaction (Kurz, 2001). Also where users are judges of delivery quality are
concerned, the various types of demands and expectations among these
interpretation service users can easily affect one’s concept of “a good
interpretation” (Kahane, 2000). Bühler (1986) tried to avoid this problem by
conducting his study among professional conference interpreters. However, a
“good interpreter” may still have completely different profiles in the minds of
other professional interpreters as they would in conference attendees
(Cartellieri, 1983). However, how long the interpreter has been active, or
“years of practise”, seems to be a common way of judging the abilities and
skills of an interpreter: the longer this individual has been working, the better
they ought to be. The International Association of Interpreters (AIIC), which
is the only global association of professional conference interpreters, requires
those who wish to apply for membership to have “at least 150 days of work
overall according to AIIC's rules and regulations” (AIIC, n.d.); yet the reason
for this number of days is not explained. Nevertheless, the 150-day criterion is
included as one of the requirements for experienced interpreters participating
in this study’s experiment.
In terms of expertise development, Anderson (1995) suggested that
interpreters have to pass through three stages to acquire necessary skills: a
cognitive stage, during which the novice is taught the basic skills and facts of
interpreting; an associative stage where the novice learns and experiments
with the acquired skillset, and finally reaches the autonomous stage where the
interpreter does not need to consciously choose and manage the various skills
to deliver good quality output, consequently leads to faster efficiency and
accuracy. These three stages can be compared with Dreyfus’ (2004) five-stage
model: the cognitive stage of Anderson (1995) would be similar to Dreyfus’
(2004) Novice and Advanced Beginner stage, the associative stage echoes
Dreyfus’ (2004) Competent and Proficient stage, and the final autonomous
stage agrees with Dreyfus’ (2004) Expert stage, in which experts are able to
make immediate decisions for solutions to the task at hand. Both models
indicate similar learning processes for an individual to become an expert,
providing check points for interpreting instructors and students to refer to. In
Taiwan, interpreting student who have completed two years of post graduate
training in T&I schools are expected to reach at least Competent level skills on
the Dreyfus model (汝明麗，2010).
Researches comparing the performances of interpreting novices or bilinguals
and professionals have been carried out in the past (Dillinger, 1990), yet it is
still extremely difficult to isolate a specific skill or aspect that distinguishes an
expert from a novice, let alone yield any results to benefit interpreting
pedagogy (Moser-Mercer, 1997). Some early researches suggest that
differences between expert and novice can be seen in reasoning knowledge
structures and how information is processed at different levels, such as the
knowledge base and level of strategies (Moser-Mercer, 1997). In terms of
knowledge base, experts and novices seem to organize their bases differently
(Kuenzli & Moser-Mercer, 1995). Experts display better organization and
connections, consequently shortening reaction time, which is consistent with
Dreyfus’ (2004) model. Yet if the expert ventures into unfamiliar subjects,
there is still a possibility the expert would deliver a novice-like performance.
Experts are also more likely to able to adjust language register according to
the context, and to draw meaning from the context and carry on with the
interpretation, as opposed to being stuck on one unfamiliar word. Novices, on
the other hand, have a higher possibility to be only able to produce individual
sentences with no discourse links that fail to deliver the message clearly, and
are more likely to be stuck or unable to carry on at one point during the task
because of one unknown word (Moser-Mercer, 1997). In other words, experts
use a more global approach, whereas novices may turn to “low-level –
microcontextual” methods (Moser-Mercer, 1997; Mayer, 1992). During sight
translation, professional interpreters are able to shift easily between the
written and oral forms and deliver a smooth and overall more satisfactory
interpretation; while beginners, or novices, are more constricted by the
original written text, and have a higher possibility of misreading the original
text (Lambert, 2004).
In addition to the later processing strategies, interpreters also engage
“comprehension strategies” during the initial stage. After the initial
comprehension stage, planning strategies are then employed for production.
This stage would affect not only the output language per se, but also register of
speech. It should be noted that research indicates that experts would employ
planning strategies in the comprehension stage, instead of waiting until the
production stage (Moser-Mercer, Frauenfelder, Casado, & Künzli, 2000), yet
it is not clear whether novices make any attempt towards employing this stage
or not.
Past researches point out that experience, training and deliberate practice are
crucial to expertise development (Dillinger, 1990), and according to Ericsson,
Prietula and Cokely, experts are trained, not born. In other words, those who
excel in respective fields achieved their success completely through hard work.
However, Dillinger focused on the aspect “experience”, and offered another
theory after conducting an experiment that involved eight experienced
professional interpreters and eight bilinguals who had never done
simultaneous interpreting. Through his experiment, he found the only
difference due to experience were that experienced interpreters were able to
extract the information more quickly than the other group, and were more
selective in the information they processed. Therefore, he concluded, the skill
to translate and interpret seems to come naturally with bilingualism.
Experienced (trained) interpreters do not acquire special skills, they just have
a more flexible way of comprehending and processing information. Yet it
should be noted that it is unclear whether the slightly better performance
(“17% improvement of accuracy”) of experienced interpreters was due to
training or experience.
Macizo and Bajo studied if there were any differences between professional
translators and untrained bilinguals when reading for repetition and reading
for translation (Macizo & Bajo, 2006). Results showed that two groups dealt
with the two tasks in a similar way, which supports Dillinger’s suggestion that
professional interpreters comprehend input in a similar way as bilinguals.
However, Macizo and Bajo further pointed out that these results cannot lead
to the conclusion that the skills and abilities of experienced
translators/interpreters are completely the same as untrained bilinguals, as
they had observed a difference in overall reaction time between the two
groups in their experiment (Macizo & Bajo, 2006).
The studies mentioned above seem to suggest that experts react and employ
strategies faster due to their experience and accumulated “database”, and also
are able to distribute their efforts more efficiently during a task. However,
experiments that were designed to observe time durations mainly focused on
total time required to complete the task, which cannot show whether
experienced interpreters began any sort of strategy earlier than novices. In her
research, Huang (2011) observed the eye movements of novices performing
sight translation. Different eye movement indexes recorded during the
experiment presented actions of the participants during different stages of the
entire process. This study will extend her research by using experienced
interpreters as participants instead of novices and comparing the eye
movement results of the two groups afterwards.
It should be noted that even though we lack clear standards on how to qualify
an interpreting “expert”, the word is still used to describe an interpreter who
is good at their job. It should be noted that the “experts” may not be actually
officially qualified, and the word is just used to distinguish the relative skill
levels of different individuals. Nevertheless, in this research the term
“interpreting expert” will be avoided since the definition of such an individual
is undetermined. Instead, the participants of this experiment, who have all
worked in the interpreting field longer than the novices, will be identified as
“experienced interpreters”. However, since they still possess relatively more
experience, the experienced interpreters in this study are expected to show the
above mentioned traits of experts, including faster and more flexible reactions.
When compared to the Dreyfus model, the novices in this research are likely
to be at the Competence or Proficiency stage (汝明麗，2010), and the
experienced interpreters are expected to reach Expertise stage. With the
support of eye movement data, this study will observe if experienced
interpreters indeed show different strategies, for example, begin to process
input earlier than novices, during sight translation. Delivery quality of the
experienced interpreters will also be evaluated according to fluency and
accuracy, two most commonly used criteria, to further support the contention
that their strategies do lead to better output.