Populating a 3D virtual learning environment for interpreting students with bilingual dialogues to support situated learning in an institutional context

Abstract

The point of departure of this article is an immersive (avatar-based) 3D virtual environment which was developed in the European project IVY – Interpreting in Virtual Reality – to simulate interpreting practice. Whilst this environment is the first 3D environment dedicated to interpreter-mediated communication, research in other educational contexts suggests that such environments can foster learning. The IVY 3D environment offers a range of virtual ‘locations’ (e.g. business meeting room, tourist office, doctor’s surgery) which serve as backdrops for the practice of consecutive and dialogue interpreting in business and public service contexts. The locations are populated with relevant objects and with robot-avatars who act as speakers by presenting recorded monologues and bilingual dialogues. Students, represented by their own avatars, join them to practise interpreting. This article focuses on the development of the bilingual dialogues, which are at the heart of many interpreter-mediated business and public service encounters but which are notoriously difficult to obtain for educational purposes. Given that interpreter training institutions usually need to offer bilingual resources of comparable difficulty levels in many language combinations, ad hoc approaches to the creation of such materials are normally ruled out. The approach outlined here was therefore to start from available corpora of spoken language that were designed with pedagogical applications in mind. The article begins by explaining how the dialogues were created and then discusses the benefits and potential shortcomings of this approach in the context of interpreter education. The main points of discussion concern (1) the level of systematicity and authenticity that can be achieved with this corpus-based approach; and (2) the potential of a 3D virtual environment to increase this sense of authenticity and thus to enable students to experience the essence of dialogue interpreting in a simulated environment.