Summarization Exercises and Interpreting Performance in Blended Interpreting Training

Abstract

Nineteen student interpreters who were unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals were recruited. Their performance in a Chinese-to-English (C-E) consecutive interpreting (CI) task, performance in an English-to-Chinese (E-C) CI task, and performance in two summarization tasks respectively following the two CI tasks were examined. Results showed that (1) no significant difference was found in students’ overall interpreting performance between C-E and E-C CI, but their performance in target language grammaticality and appropriateness was found significantly better in E-C than in C-E CI; (2) students achieved significantly better performance in the summarization following C-E CI than they did in the summarization following E-C CI; (3) in E-C CI (but not in C-E CI), summarization performance was significantly correlated with interpreting performance (both overall performance and performance in target language grammaticality and appropriateness); besides, summarization performance had significant and positive predictive power on interpreting performance in E-C CI. Pedagogical implications are discussed.