Quality Assessment Criteria in Conference Interpreting from the Perspective of Loyalty Principle Ma Dan

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1 2017 2nd International Conference on Humanities Science, Management and Education Technology (HSMET 2017) ISBN: Quality Assessment Criteria in Conference Interpreting from the Perspective of Loyalty Principle Ma Dan South China Business College, GDUFS, Guangzhou, China Keywords: conference interpreting, quality assessment, Loyalty Principle, parties concerned Abstract: Conference interpreting (CI) plays an important role around the world today, both at an international level and on a regional level. Conference interpreting, as a communicative process, which requires interpreters to take various factors into consideration, that is, initiators, target listeners, original speakers and their respective purposes as well as the characteristics of CI. Based on Loyalty Principle which is widely used in the research on the coordination among the interpersonal relationships in the parties concerned with the conference, the current study intends to probe into Loyalty Principle applied to CI quality assessment and come up with a multidimensional dynamic quality assessment mode to evaluate CI quality parameters. 1. Introduction Together with the flourishing demand for interpreters, the need for a scientific and objective assessment of interpretation quality also abounds. Since the 1990s, Western researchers and practitioners, such as Daniel Gile, Ingrid Kurz, Barbara Moser-Mercer, and Franz Pochhacker, etc. have contributed a lot to this subject. Recently the realm of research has been expanded through multidimensional research. New research models and assessment models have been explored. However, all research efforts are one-sided to some extent, in some cases the relationship between the efforts made by the interpreters and the feedback from the users about the effect of the interpreting services does not draw due attention; in other cases, different requirements about different interpretation tasks fail to attract enough considerations. Empirical studies in the sub-branch of interpreting assessment did not develop in China until the 1990s. The researchers take into consideration not only the subjective feelings and personal experience but also various factors involving in interpreting performance, including speakers, listeners, interpreters, environment and conditions of interpretation, etc. He Huiling carried out an investigation in the form of questionnaires to the speakers, initiators, interpreters and audience of nine international academic conferences in order to understand the expectations to interpreting of different groups of people[1]. In short, the existing criteria for interpretation focus on the study of different criteria on user s expectation or interpreter s performance respectively, which ignores the interconnected relationship among criteria parameters of all the parties concerned. By nature, conference interpreting is a communicative process in which people are at the core. In such a people-dominant activity, a criterion which focuses only on the source text-to-target text relationship or interpreter-to-user feedback is far from enough to assess interpreting performance. Conference interpreting, as a communicative process, which requires interpreters to take various factors into consideration, that is, initiators, target listeners, original speakers and their respective purposes as well as the characteristics of conference interpreting. Based on Loyalty Principle which is widely used in the research on the coordination among the interpersonal relationships in the parties concerned with the conference, the current study intends to probe into Loyalty Principle applied to CI quality assessment and come up with a multidimensional quality assessment mode to evaluate CI quality. 552

2 2. Loyalty Principle and Interpreting Quality Assessment According to Nord, Loyalty Principle means the interpersonal relationship among interpreters, source text authors, target text receivers and initiators of Translation[2]. This is also the case in conference interpreting. In another word, Loyalty Principle is made up of three major assessing subjects in conference interpreting, conference initiators, interpreters and interpreting users, including conference speakers and listeners, consisting of an integral part of the multidimensional assessment mode for conference interpreting quality. As illustrated in Loyalty Principle, loyalty is about the interpersonal relationship concerned in the interpreting activity. Loyalty stresses the respect and coordination of the intentions of speakers source texts, expectations of interpreting users of target texts and the purpose of interpreting events, which tends to show a dynamic relationship among the parties concerned with the conference and closely connects with the assessment subjects of conference interpreting. Combing the above factors, the author hopes to conceive a dynamic and multidimensional quality assessment mode for conference interpreting from the three-facet perspectives: initiators perspective, interpreters performance and interpreting users expectation. The different facet will be stressed on evaluating a certain specific parameter among assessing subjects in the conference interpreting. More importantly, the relationship between Loyalty Principle and the three-facet quality assessment mode for conference interpreting will be deeply probed into through empirical study by relevant questionnaire surveys in quantitative way to prove that Loyalty Principle has an influential significe to the study of quality assessment for conference interpreting dynamically. 3. Dynamic Assessment Mode of CI Based on Loyalty Principle Conference interpreting is a pragmatic and interpreting performance, which is usually viewed a both a process and a product, so is interpreting quality assessment, for it also be approached from both the level of process and the level of a product. Loyalty Principle is applied in the assessment of conference interpreting for this principle s pragmatic nature, being loyal to the interests and purposes of various parties concerned in a certain setting. The author intends to take into account the features and needs of conference interpreting and its quality assessment and approach the issue of interpreting quality assessment on a micro level with the application of Loyalty Principle into the judgment of the assessment criteria of interpreting performance Questionnaire survey Survey respondents The research respondents attending China-Australia Green Building and Eco-city Forum hold in Guangzhou on 16 September in 2010, are totally 30 people participated three different questionnaire surveys, including 16 people from survey of a panel discussion transferred with simultaneous interpreting in the morning (hereinafter Panel Discussion ), 12 from matching activity delivered with consecutive interpreting in the afternoon (hereinafter Matching Activity ), all of them were interviewed on the users expectations questionnaire survey (the valid survey respondents are 30 out of 45 total interviewees), one respondent are on-the-spot interpreter on the survey of interpreter s performance and one interviewee is the organizer of host unit of this forum, MBA-Marketing Senior Team Leader, Australia Trade Commission, giving the response to the survey on the initiator s perspective. The majority out of 30 respondents are professionals in relevant fields of the forum, being capable of high-level professional knowledge and bilingual ability Survey questions The survey questions are designed to probe the following issue -- how we define the assessment mode from the perspective of Loyalty Principle? To find out relevant results of this issue, the author is trying to conduct the empirical survey, adopt the quantitative analysis and making some more specific questions as follows: Firstly, as the parties concerned with the conference interpreting, do users expectations vary remarkably in different interpreting type s conferences? Secondly, how 553

3 important is the interpreters role in coordination with the interpreting users at interpreting conferences? Lastly, how do initiator s evaluations feed back to the interpreters performance adhering to Loyalty Principle? Data analysis The main adopted methodology for data analysis is to give importance to the interpreting quality factors, the respondents, including interpreting users, initiator and interpreters and need to give priority choice to some relevant factors, that s to say, the respondents decide to choose the one among the comparable items, the results of analysis depend on the choice of the proportion of some parameter among all the items Questionnaire on user s expectation Users expectations to interpreters role in different interpreting types Based on Kurz s [3], Moser-Mercer s[4], Kopczynski sstudies[5], the author of this thesis took a questionnaire survey on the users expectations to the interpreter s role and coordination at the different interpreting types conferences. Totally, 16 respondents took part in this questionnaire survey in the panel discussion transferred with simultaneous interpreting (hereinafter SI ) based on the topic of Future of Green Building and Eco-city Development in China and Australia. There are 12 respondents gave responses to the questionnaire survey in business matching activity transferred by consecutive interpreting (hereinafter CI ). Both conference adopted professional terminology with colloquial style and formal address, nearly 60% of 28 attendees are bilingual speakers with superior language expertise. Items Interpreting type Highlight the speaker s purpose Paraphrase the speaker s perspective Coordinate the speakers and users relationship Table 1. The interpreters role in SI and CI (%). Panel Discussion (SI) (N=16) Totall Totall Sometimes y Can Can t y Meeting Activity (CI) (N=12) Can Sometimes Can t Two pairs of interpreting users tend to hold a similar attitude towards the interpreter s role at two different interpreting type s conferences. As shown in Table 1, the majority of those users have comparatively positive expectations for interpreters to highlight the speaker s purpose. The ratios between the two pairs of users are 81.5% and 75%. But the minority users (18.5%, 25%) think interpreters not do it well. The majority of uses have a similar expectation for interpreters coordinating the relationship between speakers and listeners. Nevertheless, there are more users (62.5%) in panel discussion than the users (58.33%) in matching activity think the interpreters coordinate the relationship among the parties concerned, which shows that interpreter should not only deliver a satisfactory rendering according to the purpose of all parties and also mediate their intentions and coordinate their relationship. The interpreter s role is emphasized on analyzing user s expectations at two different interpreting type conferences. According to the survey, the author proposes the interpreters should balance a role between intruders and ghost. For the conference with higher standard expertise, the interpreters should not take more interventions to the speaker s speech, in case to deliver some messages by mistake. And for some conference with general topics and colloquial style, the interpreters take initiative to paraphrase and adjust the speaker s speech to help interpreting users understand the speaker s speech. 554

4 Coordination Table 2. The coordination of interpreters with interpreting users in SI and CI (%). Interpreting type Panel Discussion (SI) (N=16) Meeting Activity (CI) (N=12) Very good Good Fair Bad 0 0 Generally speaking, the rendering difficulty in SI is much bigger than that in CI, such as time limitation, highly pressure situation, noisy environment, all of these factors will impact on the interpreter s performance. However, as Table 2 shows, there are different evaluations on the interpreter s coordination with parties concerned at the conferences. Comparatively, more respondents in panel discussion than the ones in meeting activity give a good level to interpreters performance, however, fewer respondents in panel discussion than the ones in meeting activity give a fair level to interpreters performance. All in all, the data shows that the respondents with higher language proficiency and superior expertise have rational and objective evaluation to interpreters performance, those bilingual professionals evaluate those criteria in more overall systematic viewing angles, preferring to stress on the communicative effects and coordinated effort during the interpreting process rather than focus on the linguistic delivery of both languages partially Questionnaire on interpreter s performance In order to probe the result of interpreter s coordinating with parties concerned, and how much the interpreter s coordination would impact on the conference interpreting quality. Based on Cai s study[6], the author designed a questionnaire centering on three major parts. Part 1 includes the first 9 questions, investigated the interpreter s professional competence, part 2 consists question 10 and question 11, highlighting the interpreter s coordination with parties concerned, question 12 belongs to part 3, emphasizing on the interpreter s self- assessment. The questionnaire is adopted Likert Scale and ranked five levels in category, namely, level 1 stands for quite low, level 2 below normal, level 3 normal, level 4 above normal, level 5 quite high and respectively stands for 20, 40, 60,80 and 100. The author calculated the final marks of interpreter s professional competence, the coordination among parties concerned and interpreter s self-assessment are 71, 53 and 60 respectively. During the interview, the interpreter showed that the coordination among the parties concerned has certainly influenced on her performance at the forum. Insufficient relevant information, such as, forum agenda and general information of the keynote addresser during the whole interpreting process, she felt quite stressful physically and mentally on the spot, she said she was catching up on the speaker all the way during the interpreting, which made her exhausted in that morning. In order to achieve optimized and maximum loyalty to initiators and their purpose, the initiators also need to coordinate with interpreters before, during and after conference interpreting. The interpreters must be kept well-informed of the first-hand information, such as, conference agenda, subject knowledge, company brochure, guests background for an in-depth preparation and a satisfactory rendering. Though the result is only from one interpreter, it is not objective and scientific enough, the questionnaire should be regarded as a starting point for further relevant researches. In other words, the research of the coordination among the parties concerned during the interpreting conference should be attached great importance, which benefit the future interpreting training and researches deeply in some way. 3.4 Questionnaire on initiator s perspective A feasible questionnaire is obtained, based on Kopczynski s and Cai s study, the author design this questionnaire to obtaining the feedback of the three parts, the first part stresses on the general 555

5 evaluation the interpreters performance. In the second part, initiators evaluation to interpreters service quality involves eight aspects. The final part focuses on the suggestions for improving the interpreters service quality from the perspective of initiators. From the result of this questionnaire on initiator of China-Australia Green Building and Eco-city Forum, it s very distinct that the initiator gave a quite excellent evaluation to the interpreters at the forum. For the first part, he mentioned the interpreter s performance achieved the purpose of the forum, that s to say, interpreters has accomplished their tasks complying with the requirement of translation brief. This be correspondingly loyal to the initiators, which made the initiator be quite satisfactory with interpreters performance. In the second part, the initiator gave a comparatively excellent level evaluation to the intra-textual factors in interpreting service quality including the aspects of bilingual competence, subject knowledge, interpreting skill, professional ethics and qualification. However, the evaluation of good level goes to the aspects of some extra-textual factors, such as, communicative ability and coordination. From the contrastive analysis of intra-textual and extra-textual factors in this questionnaire on the initiator s perspective, it s probed clearly that the excellent interpreting delivery is closely interconnected with their high degrees of professional proficiency and interpreting expertise. On the other hand, the extra-textual factors, such as, coordination with initiators of the conference should be emphasized, no each party be ignored at the complicated parties concerned at the conference. The interpreting effect is not only evaluated by the comparison between the source text -to- target text linguistically, even evaluated by the authentic communicative effect. All parties should shed light on their mutual cooperation for the conference to work out a dynamic multidimensional approach to probe into the interpreting performance empirically and scientifically. 4. Summary In this study, the author gave priority to the quantitative research for probing deeply into the dynamic perspective of loyalty, trying to analyze the interpersonal relationship among the interpreters, initiators and interpreting users. Though the author did three different questionnaire surveys on the different parties concerned, there are also limitations of the current research for the limited conditions and insufficient personal competence. First, the assessment processes are unusually complicated and time-consuming which involves different perspectives and experiment techniques, therefore, not all the results of these researches be compared with a single standard, the previous empirical studies have showed that the lack of comparability among individual empirical studies. Furthermore, the objectiveness of the users expectations is still unsatisfactory, not all interpreting users are bilingual who have sufficient knowledge of both source language and target language and are qualified for the role of respondents. Therefore, their assessment of conference interpreting quality not be regarded to be objective enough. To sum up, the current research intends to build a comparatively scientific and objective perspective to evaluate the interpreting quality in a dynamic multidimensional mode; however, due to time limitation and personal insufficient competence and inadequate theoretical knowledge and lacking of interpreting practice, the proposed issues should be further probed in the following relevant researches more elaborately and objectively. Acknowledgements This research is sponsored by the Key Program of the English Language and Literature of Guangdong Province, Reference [1] X. H. Cai, Interpretation and Evaluation. Beijing: China Translation & Publishing Corporation,

6 [2] M. F. Zhang. Function Plus Loyalty: On Nord s Functionalist Approach to Translation. Journal of Foreign Language, vol.1, 60-65, [3] I. Kurz, Conference interpretation: Expectations of Different User Groups. The Interpreters Newsletter, vol.5, pp ,1993. [4] B. Moser-Mercer, Quality in interpreting: some Methodological issues. The Interpreter s Newsletter, vol.7, 43-35,1996. [5] A. Kopzynski, Quality in Conference Interpreting: some Pragmatic Problems. Snell-Hornby, pp.87-99, [6] X. H. Cai, and F.Q. Fang, Evaluation Interpreting Quality and Effect. Foreign Language and Their Teaching, vol.3, pp.41-45,