Emotional stability as a predictor for interpreter competence: A consideration in determining aptitude for interpreting

Karen Bontempo and Jemina Napier, Macquarie University, Australia

This paper proposes that successful performance as an interpreter is dependent on dimensions of both cognitive functioning and personality. General cognitive ability is shown to be a strong predictor of success in many occupational contexts, however the relationship between personality and achievement in a profession is less conclusive. Organizational psychologists have long theorized that the notions of a “person-vocation fit” and a “work personality” have legitimacy, however.

This paper reports on a research study conducted on 110 accredited signed language interpreters in Australia. Self-efficacy, goal orientation and negative affectivity constructs were measured, as well as interpreter ratings of perceived competence.

The dimension of emotional stability (represented by traits of anxiety and neuroticism, and measured by the negative affectivity scale in this study) demonstrated the most significant finding as a predictor of perceived interpreter competence. Recommendations for admission testing and interpreter education program curricula based on the findings of the study will be discussed in the paper.

Domain-general cognitive abilities and interpreter skill prediction

Brooke N. Macnamara, Adam B. Moore and Andrew R.A. Conway, Princeton University, USA

The current study examined the feasibility of predicting interpreter skill level based only on a variety of cognitive abilities and essential personality traits of twenty professional American Sign Language – English interpreters. Overall, we found trends of interpreters rated as more highly skilled performing superior to interpreters rated as less skilled in measures of intrinsic motivation to engage in complex cognitive tasks, measures of fluid intelligence, cognitive control, willingness to take risks, and psychomotor speed.

There was no significant difference in years of experience between the highly skilled group and the less skilled group suggesting that the aforementioned cognitive abilities and personality traits are candidates for predicting the successful acquisition of interpreting skill prior to any actual experience. Follow up research will be conducted in an attempt to replicate the results as well as investigate other domain-general cognitive abilities that may qualify as aptitudinal measures.

Testing aptitude for interpreting: The SynCloze test

Franz Pöchhacker, University of Vienna, Austria

Based on a review of some of the most promising approaches to aptitude testing in the literature I will propose a novel task that has been piloted at the Center for Translation Studies of the University of Vienna. The SynCloze test combines a customized auditory cloze exercise with a task requiring high expressional fluency, that is, finding contextually appropriate synonymic expressions.

The paper will describe the rationale and design of the SynCloze test as well as the scoring method, which takes into account both the degree of accuracy and the speed of response. The results of three rounds of testing involving some 70 students in the final stage of their undergraduate studies will be presented and examined for correlations with results on a monolingual end-of-term interpreting exam.

Linking attitude to aptitude

Alexandra Rosiers, June Eyckmans, Erasmus University College Brussels and Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Daniël Bauwens, Erasmus University College Brussels, Belgium

Contrary to the early days of interpreter training when the majority of student interpreters used to be bilinguals, most student interpreters nowadays are monolinguals who are still in the process of acquiring the target language(s). As a consequence several interpreter training colleges notice that increasingly more students consider themselves eligible for undertaking interpreting training. This raises questions about aptitude and as to which skills – linguistic as well as non-linguistic – are a prerequisite for starting interpreting training. This study focuses on non-linguistic skills and how these relate to linguistic interpreting performance.

It aims to investigate the ways in which the attitudinal profiles of the student translators and student interpreters differ by obtaining information regarding their self-perceived communication competence, self-perception of language skills, anxiety levels and integrative motivation. In a second stage, we set out to relate their profiles to their interpreting performance, which were assessed by a ‘blind judge’ along two parameters: (1) the students’ global task fulfilment, (2) the students’ fluency in English.

The results of this study will be presented and the possible ramifications for interpreter training and admission testing will be discussed.

Aptitude for interpreting: Predicting competence in a reliable way

Heidi Salaets and Šárka Timarová, Lessius University College, Belgium

Aptitude testing is a special type of assessment where performance is judged by a predictive, rather than a concurrent criterion. Aptitude tests are critical in admission procedures, where they help make decisions as to the candidate’s ability to acquire a skill within a given timeframe.

In our paper, we want to report on our replication of a study by Gerver et al. (1989). This replication is part of a larger research project (2007-2010) at LUC (Lessius University College) aiming to investigate predictors of specific skilled linguistic behaviour, namely interpreting. With more tests and a larger amount of students tested in the follow-up of this project, we want to check if discrepant results from Gerver’s remain the same, this is to say if we can increase ecological validity.

We discuss the implications of this particular study and the more general specificities of aptitude research, including validity, reliability, score range restrictions and generalisability across training programmes.

Cognitive and motivational contributors to aptitude: A study of spoken and signed language interpreting students

Sherry Shaw, University of North Florida, USA

This presentation reports findings of a 2008 exploratory study with spoken and signed language interpreting students at Charles University (Czech Republic), Karl-Franzens-University of Graz (Austria), Utrecht University (The Netherlands) and Lessius University College (Belgium). Participants were categorized as “entry-level” or “advanced” students, depending upon experience in simultaneous interpreting coursework, to identify dimensions of aptitude that may not be apparent at program admission, but that might emerge during training.

The purpose was to explore aptitude from the standpoint of students already admitted to interpreting programs and observe key characteristics that contribute to perseverance and successful program completion. The study utilized two instruments, the Achievement Motivation Inventory and CNS Vital Signs, to assess cognitive functioning and motivation dispositions of 47 students on such characteristics as cognitive flexibility, verbal and visual memory, psychomotor speed, complex attention, reaction time, compensatory effort, competitiveness, confidence in success, flexibility, independence, persistence, preference for difficult tasks, and self-control.

Sign language interpreter language and interpreting aptitude

Christopher Stone, University College London, United Kingdom

Currently short and long-term training programmes for sign language interpreters in the UK have no objective selection criteria. This longitudinal study uses a battery of language, motor/gesture and psychological tests to compare expert sign language interpreters with those in undergraduate interpreter training programs. The test battery administered includes: the MLAT (modern language aptitude test; an English reading test; a non-sign repetition task; a BSL grammaticality judgement task; a digit span task; and a matrix reasoning task.

The tests have been selected to identify general language aptitude and modality specific aptitude (spoken vs signed languages). Preliminary data will be presented from the first year of the three year project enabling an analysis of the first year cohort with expert interpreters and identifying trends in the data that may indicate potential avenues for exploration in the future.

Aptitude for conference interpreting: One test or two?

Šárka Timarová, Lessius University College, Belgium, and Jana Rejšková, Charles University, Czech Republic

Literature on interpreting discusses two main modes of conference interpreting (consecutive and simultaneous), but aptitude for interpreting seems to be understood as a single construct. Accordingly, admission tests typically do not include separate tests for consecutive and simultaneous interpreting aptitude. Rejšková (1999) set out to explore this issue, and concluded that consecutive and simultaneous interpreting tap different skills and warrant separate aptitude tests.

In the present study, we report on a follow-up on the study by Rejšková. Six simultaneous interpreting exercises were administered to 80 conference interpreting students. The exercises included shadowing (repeating verbatim the source text), personalised cloze test (repeating verbatim the source text, but changing pre-specified segments), and four simultaneous interpreting exercises from a foreign language into the mother tongue. Performance on the simultaneous exercises is correlated with interim exam results, both consecutive and simultaneous, to determine whether the two interpreting modes show different relationship with the tests.

Phraseological competence as a predictor of interpreting skills

Simon Van Rietvelde, June Eyckmans, Erasmus University College Brussels and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and Daniël Bauwens, Erasmus University College Brussels, Belgium

In this paper presentation we will investigate the role of phraseological competence as a predictor for a student's interpreting skills. Phraseology can be described as the study of syntagmatic relations between individual words. Not only does phraseological competence improve language learners' perceived oral proficiency (Boers et al. 2006), interpreting performances also seem to draw heavily on phraseological competence in the target language (Eyckmans et al. 2006a; Eyckmans et al. 2006b; Eyckmans 2007).

With this research project we aim to investigate whether the interpreter's working memory can be significantly unburdened by recycling and holistically reproducing chunks or phrases. Relying on phraseological competence might enable the interpreter to attribute more attention to the many different cognitive processes that take place simultaneously during the interpreting performance. While interpreting, these processes battle for the limited processing capacity of the working memory. Phrases are believed to be stored and retrieved as a whole from memory. (Wray 2002) Holistic retrieval might reduce analytical processing and therefore unburden working memory. Consequently, more cognitive effort can be invested in bringing the message across, which will lead to more accurate interpreting performances.