Abstract
Tertiary-level interpreter training and education have developed rapidly in China, and over 200 undergraduate and over 200 postgraduate T&I programs have been launched over the past decade. Despite the rapid development, there has been no standardized framework allowing for the reliable and valid measurement of interpreting competence in China. Against this background, the China Standards of English (CSE), which are the Chinese counterpart to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), were unveiled in 2018 after 4 years of government-funded research and validation. One vital component of the CSE is the descriptor-referenced interpreting competence scales. This article provides a systematic account of the design, development, and validation of the interpreting competence scales in China. Within the CSE, the construct of interpreting competence was defined according to an interactionist approach. It not only encompasses cognitive abilities, interpreting strategies, and subject-matter knowledge but also considers performance in typical communicative settings. Based on the construct definition, a corpus of relevant descriptors was built from three main sources, including: (a) interpreting training syllabuses, curricular frameworks, rating scales, and professional codes of conduct; (b) previous literature on interpreting performance assessment, competence development, and interpreter training and education; and (c) exemplar-generation data on assessing interpreting competence and typical interpreting activities, which were collected from interpreting professionals, trainers, and trainees. The corpus contains 9,208 descriptors of interpreting competence. A mixed-method survey was then conducted to analyze, scale, and validate the descriptors among 30,682 students, 5,787 teachers, and 139 interpreting professionals from 28 provinces, municipalities, and regions in China. The finalized set included 369 descriptors that reference interpreting competence. The CSE—Interpreting Competence Scales with theoretically and empirically based descriptors represent a major effort in research on interpreting competence and its assessment, and they have significant potential to be applied widely in interpreting training, research, and assessment.
Highlights
In the mid-twentieth century, universities began to offer programs designed to train conference interpreters (Pöchhacker, 2015), and the first group of programs was offered in Moscow (1930), Heidelberg (1933), Geneva (1941), and Vienna (1943)
This paper reports on the development process of the China Standards of English (CSE)– Interpreting Competence Scales, which involved research work in two major parts, divided into five stages, as follows (Figure 1): Part I: Drafting the scales: the creation of a descriptor pool
Reviewing the CSE-Interpreting data according to the cutoff points in Table 2, we found that 40% of the descriptors
Summary
In the mid-twentieth century, universities began to offer programs designed to train conference interpreters (Pöchhacker, 2015), and the first group of programs was offered in Moscow (1930), Heidelberg (1933), Geneva (1941), and Vienna (1943). A nationwide survey was first launched to collect quantitative data from potential users of the interpreting competence scales, including interpreting learners, trainers, and interpreters at various levels This round of validation involved three steps: Step 1: Questionnaire Design The validation of interpreting competence descriptors was conducted within the context of the national project of CSE (Liu, 2019). As Bond and Fox (2015) suggested, the Rasch rating scale model (RSM) can establish patterns in the rating scale categories in order to yield a single rating scale structure common to all the items on the scale In this project, RSM analysis was performed by the CSE statistics team to estimate the relative difficulty of each of the interpreting competence descriptors, as rated by students and by teachers, and to examine the quality of rating scale responses. BTI, Bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting; MTI, Master’s degree in Translation and Interpreting
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