Fidelity Assessment in Consecutive Interpretation

Abstract

Abstract In a classroom French-to-English consecutive interpretation experiment, both the speaker and the (student) delegates were found to be unreliable fidelity assessors: they did not detect all interpretation errors on the one hand, and imagined errors that had not been made by the interpreter, on the other. As to their fidelity ratings, they remained surprisingly close to each other in spite of a wide spread in the number of reported errors. The paper also discusses this experiment in the wider context of interpretation research policy.