Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 13, Issue 3, 2018

This pilot study examines the recent phenomenon of tablet interpreting. Based on in-depth interviews with six practitioners, which were transcribed and analyzed inductively, the article presents an overview of software, tools, and technology that interpreters currently utilize in their work. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate regular, effective tablet use in various consecutive interpreting settings. Participants feel that these tools meet their needs and outstrip the functionalities offered by pen and paper in most contexts. This study compiles best practices for tablet interpreting, discusses their benefits and challenges, and describes features to consider when assessing new and existing tablets, applications, and styluses. The data underscore the need for training in this budding field, which represents a key area for future research and professional practice.

Research on technology and interpreting regularly investigates technology-mediated interpreting settings and contrasts various interpreting configurations to better understand how technology changes the interpreting task. This scholarship generally does not account for various personality or character attributes exhibited by interpreters, nor does it examine the actual adoption and usage of these tools. This article presents findings from a survey-based study that examines several interpreter-specific constructs, namely their self-perception of the interpreter’s role and communication apprehension, in conjunction with attitudes toward technology use and adoption. Findings suggest that community interpreters differ from their conference interpreting counterparts and that domain-specific differences emerge between medical and court interpreters with respect to their perceived role and their propensity to adopt new technologies.

The increasing use of videoconferencing technology in legal proceedings has led to different configurations of video-mediated interpreting (VMI). Few studies have explored interpreter perceptions of VMI, each focusing on one country, configuration (e.g., interpreter-assisted video links between courts and remote participants) and setting (e.g., immigration). The present study is the first that draws on multiple data sets, countries, settings and configurations to investigate interpreter perceptions of VMI. It compares perceptions in England with other countries, covering common configurations (e.g., court-prison video links, links to remote interpreters) and settings (e.g., police, court, immigration), and considers the sociopolitical context in which VMI has emerged. The aim is to gain systematic insights into factors shaping the interpreters’ perceptions as a step toward improving VMI.

This article reviews the design and methodology developed for compiling and analyzing corpora that can inform corpus-based studies involving public service interpreting discourses. The corpus was transcribed and annotated using the EXMARaLDA software tools designed for working with oral corpora. The annotation system accounts for Wadensjö’s (1998) distinction between “talk-as-text” and “talk-as-activity” in order to classify interpreters’ various problems when working in criminal proceedings and the strategies they adopt in response. The article provides the results of an analysis of a pilot sample of 20 criminal proceedings, focusing on non-renditions and distinguishing between those that are “justified” and those that are “unjustified.” The article then discusses these preliminary results as part of the ongoing project.

This study examines the feasibility of mobile technology for interpreter education. While interpreter education and its use of technology is well-established and documented in developed countries, educational opportunities for signed language interpreters in developing countries are scarce. One innovation, mobile phone technology, appears to be changing patterns of technological adoption in developed and developing countries, connecting those previously denied access by geography or income. Education through mobile applications, or m-learning, was used to provide professional development to interpreters from the U.S. and Ghana in an action research pilot study. Surveys, discussions, and reflections were analyzed to identify the types of technologies employed, challenges encountered, evidence of learning, and collegial interactions. While successful outcomes were documented, findings indicate feasibility is still dependent on several factors.

This article describes the results of the pilot testing phase of the first LangPerform dialogue interpreting simulations, which replicated authentic communication situations in a Finnish daycare center and consisted of interpreting and sight translation tasks. Five students with German and three with English as their B-language participated in the pilot testing. Afterwards, they were interviewed about their experience and thoughts about the simulations. They were positively surprised by the authenticity of the simulation and regarded the simulation as an excellent additional training method for self-training and self-evaluation. Negative feedback that drew away from authenticity mainly concerned the predetermined time reserved for interpreting, which resulted in there sometimes being long pauses or, on several occasions, not enough time to interpret.

Training translators to react to sudden emergencies is a challenge. This article presents the results of a training experiment testing the speed of acquisition of the skills necessary to operate the open-source Moses statistical machine translation (SMT) system. A task-based approach was used with trainee translators who had no experience working with MT technology. The experiment is a feasibility study to ascertain whether training on Moses SMT could be considered for long-lasting crisis scenarios. The article reports its findings in four sections. The first section discusses the research context in which ‘crisis translation’ is defined; the second section illustrates the rationale of the experiment; the third section looks at the results of the training experiment; and the fourth at the trainees’ perceptions of their learning processes. The conclusion reflects on the viability of using Moses and on the next phases needed to refine the findings of this first experiment.