InContext - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2022

In this article, I would like to leave written testimony about how we coped with the COVID-19 pandemic in the Spanish Interpretation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), where I teach English into Spanish simultaneous and consecutive interpretation. I will describe our experience immediately after COVID-19 hit the US, how professors and students transitioned from an in-person program to a remote one, how we stayed in a fully remote program for two and a half semesters, and how we went back to the physical classroom to a hybrid model once restrictions were lifted in the US. I will explain how I structured my simultaneous and consecutive interpretation classes in each semester that we stayed remote and the changes that I introduced once we went back to campus to a hybrid model. In addition, I will address some of the pros and cons that I found with each model based on my own experience. I will also cover the different initiatives that MIIS has put in place to support the professional development of professors to adapt our classes to the remote and hybrid model. To conclude, I would like to share with the readers the results of a survey conducted among students taking the Master of Arts in Translation and Interpretation (MATI), Master of Arts in Conference Interpretation (MACI), Master of Arts in Translation (MAT), and Master of Arts in Translation and Localization Management (MATLM) in the Spanish Interpretation Program at MIIS. The students who completed the survey were exposed to the remote, hybrid, and in-person models. The purpose of the survey was to informally gather the students’ opinions on the different models for learning interpretation that they experienced: in-person, online, and hybrid. I will finish the article with a reflection on the future of teaching interpretation in the Spanish Interpretation Program at MIIS.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic not only impacted the circulation of people and goods on a global scale but also affected the events sector, the conference interpreting market, and the training of future interpreters. The present text aims to share the experience of the all in all successful transition from face-to-face teaching to remote teaching during the pandemic and thus contribute to the already existing academic accounts on the effects of the pandemic on conference interpreting teaching and learning (Ahrens et al., 2021; Krouglov, 2021). We identify three major aspects that led to a rather smooth teaching mode transition: (1) the efforts that had been undertaken in the years prior to the pandemic to incorporate autonomous learning practices into the curriculum leading to the use of online tools, shifting classroom activities to the home/virtual environment; (2) the training of some members of our staff in blended learning techniques and the active use of learning platforms in training; and (3) the software offered by the university for online sessions. This article is divided into three parts: First, we present the main features of PUC-Rio’s original training course, then we redraw the steps taken to gradually adapt the course to the challenge of remote online teaching during the pandemic, and finally we draw an initial reflection on the program’s adaptation to the online teaching and learning format. We understand that, while the pandemic has posed a major challenge to our conventional teaching and learning mode, the program was able to overcome initial difficulties. Furthermore, the transition to a fully remote teaching mode led to unforeseen opportunities as far as, for instance, the recruitment of new candidates nation-wide is concerned. We understand that PUC-Rio’s adoption of a fully remote teaching and learning mode from 2020 onwards opens up new perspectives for conference interpreting training in the post-pandemic landscape in Brazil.

There is general agreement that adequate entrance selection to conference interpreting courses is key to ensuring successful outcomes, as well as to guaranteeing a wise use of limited resources and satisfactory class dynamics. Indeed, entrance selection is one of the key quality assessment criteria for membership to the European Masters in Conference Interpreting (EMCI).

Conference interpreter training programmes (CITPs) in Europe use a range of written and oral exercises to identify suitable candidates at entrance. The core test procedure is usually a series of “gist” or recall exercises, in which candidates are required to re-express in another language the ideas conveyed in a short presentation.

Prior to 2020 these exercises were for the most part held with a panel of assessors and the candidates in an interview room at the host university. The COVID-19-related restrictions introduced in Europe since March 2020 in effect led to an enforced experiment with a new mode of test delivery, as stringent travel and meeting restrictions forced many programmes to switch to remote selection. This was initially seen as an unfortunate temporary expedient, but we would suggest that it might be an opportunity to take a fresh look at aptitude testing procedures. Despite the lifting of restrictions, a number of programmes continue to conduct their entrance tests in remote mode.

It would be premature at this stage to draw conclusions about student outcomes, but it is worth considering trainer, student, and course coordinators’ perceptions of and experience with the new procedures.

The article focuses on the CITPs in the EMCI, a consortium of 15 members at time of the outbreak of the pandemic. The data examined have been collected through a series of questionnaires and interviews. Student questionnaires have been collected mainly from the two Paris-based programmes, ISIT and ESIT; panellist questionnaires and interviews from ISIT, ESIT and Herzen in St Petersburg. 15 course coordinators in the EMCI have been consulted and 11 interviewed. The viewpoints of each of these three groups differ. The likely reasons for these differences are presented and discussed.

The views and experience compiled and analysed are intended to feed into a broader discussion about aptitude testing.

There were no educational institutions in the world which predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic would force them to go completely online. Unlike the more conventional courses which involve the instructor giving a lecture and students asking questions, for interpretation classes, especially simultaneous interpretation, there are more than two people talking at the same time, thereby complicating the technical aspect by several fold. Due to the global outbreak of COVID-19 and the spread of remote interpretation, however, in the future, remote oral language mediation could become the new norm and “the new situation will thoroughly rearrange the market for language service providers as well as interpreter training” (Eszenyi, 2021, p. 112). In view of recent trends, it was felt that educational institutions of interpretation and translation should also engage in a constructive dialogue regarding effective ways to provide remote interpretation instruction. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to analyze online interpretation classes from the point of view of the ‘social presence theory’ which has already been proven to be an effective analytical tool in research regarding online mediated learning environments. To this end, we conducted a survey of instructors and interpreting students at interpretation institutions in Korea. The analysis shows that both instructors and students experienced a low level of social presence in terms of its three dimensions: co-presence, psychological involvement, and behavioral engagement due to 100% online interpretation classes. Based on the findings, we suggest that interpretation and translation institutions offer classes in an online and offline hybrid format with more opportunities for offline interaction outside of class. In addition, we emphasize the need for technical support at the school level because the technical aspects are important in learning efficieny in the computer mediated communication (CMC) environment. Unlike previous remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI) studies, this study holds significance in that it explored the issue of remote interpretation education using the social presence theory.

During the two years that Malaysia was under intermittent lockdown under the COVID-19 pandemic, the public paid close attention to the daily media briefings from the Ministry of Health and Home Affairs Ministry. While the public waited eagerly for the press conferences, a small corner of the television screen with a gesturing individual caught their imagination, and there were many viral memes and discussions in the social media. This study examines these public perceptions through the lens of personal accounts and retrospective interviews with each of the sign language interpreters to examine the challenges and demands they encountered when working in the context of a civil and health emergency. The impact, control measures, and general wellbeing of these sign language interpreters pre-, during, and post-coverage are analyzed to provide comprehensive insight into their experiences of the Catch-22 situations where they found it difficult to break away. These personal accounts are contrasted with the perceptions of the Malaysian Deaf Community, who were highly critical of the interpreters’ skills regarding their understanding of the degree of accessibility and the quality of their interpretation of technical and critical information under circumstances when the interpreters themselves and the audience were under tremendous stress from the bombardment of dire news, global uncertainties, and unrelieved economic pressures. This study debunks many of the myths and misconceptions of the public on the Deaf Community and sign language interpreters, such as the use of a standardized or universal sign language, the environmental demands of interpreting during a crisis, the conflicting interpersonal and intrapersonal moments experienced by the interpreters, and the linguistic and paralinguistic demands encountered during the press conferences. Even interpreters with many decades of interpreting on television and in the community found their personal worldviews as well as their understanding of their role and their profession dramatically altered and reassessed because of interpreting during these two unprecedented years.

Remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) and computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools powered by automatic speech recognition (ASR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are both technological developments in the interpreting profession propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the additional complexity of operating a user interface (UI) during simultaneous interpreting, we may consider UI design and overall system usability to be of crucial importance for successful RSI. However, to our knowledge, no previous article presented the evaluation of an RSI platform from the perspective of its usability and users’ requirements. In this article, we present a recent evaluation study of the RSI platform SmarTerp. Refl cting a general trend in the industry, SmarTerp is one of the first RSI systems to integrate an ASR/CAI tool. This paper presents the first evaluation study of a CAI-tool integrated RSI platform. The study drew on the usability engineering evaluation methods of expert appraisal and field trial. Eight high-level conference interpreters tested SmarTerp in a simulated RSI conference based on a real debate at the European Parliament. The interpreters were divided into four booths (DEU, FRA, ITA, SPA) and ENG was the relay language. After the test, they completed three tasks gathering feedback from the perspective of (1) the individual interpreter, (2) the booth, and (3) the group of professionals. After presenting the SmarTerp project, the paper defines the concept of ‘usability’ and details the study method. The discussion of the results sheds light on interpreters’ needs and requirements for RSI systems.

It is widely known in the interpreting industry that the COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for the global spread of remote interpreting, the technology for which had existed for years prior. As governments and businesses continued to hold their meetings online or in hybrid forms even after lockdowns were lifted, demand kept rising (Nimdzi Insights, 2022). In order to investigate the immediate impact of the pandemic on remote interpreting, an online survey with a focus on remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) was conducted in the summer of 2020 in Japan (Matsushita, 2020b). The results revealed that while only 18.8% (n = 43) of the 229 respondents had RSI experience before the pandemic, the number jumped to 44.5% (n = 102) by the end of July 2020, with 91.7% (n = 210) of them envisioning that remote interpreting opportunities will continue to increase.

This prediction turned out to be true: a smaller survey conducted in Japan 17 months later in January 2022 revealed that all 51 respondents (100%) had experienced remote interpreting, with 58.8% (n = 30) saying that almost all of their assignments (at the time of the survey) were taking place remotely (Ikaros Publications, 2022). This trend is, of course, not limited to Japan. Numerous industry reports published in 2021 and 2022 showed a shared conviction that remote interpreting is here to stay (e.g., Association of Language Companies, 2021; Nimdzi Insights, 2022; Slator, 2022).

Against this backdrop, this study conducted a detailed analysis of the survey responses from Matsushita (2020b) to reinvestigate the transformation the interpreters experienced during the most turbulent months of the pandemic and find insights into remote interpreting in the post-pandemic world. Compared to Matsushita (2020b), which reported the aggregated survey results, this study will focus more on differences among the interpreters, language pairs, and interpreting genres represented.