Assessment Scales for Evaluation of Students’ Interpreting Skills

Abstract

The paper focuses on describing the methodology of an experiment, conducted within the research directed at the development of interpreting skills^[1]. The aim of the research is to create an experimental syllabus of a course of introduction to interpreting, which focuses on the development of interpreting skills prior to consecutive interpreting; and to test and evaluate its effectiveness. For this reason, an experiment was conducted, which measures interpreting skills of students at the beginning and at the end of the semester. The exact, step-by-step methodology of the assessment is the key contribution of this paper which might prove to be useful for other interpreter trainers. The paper therefore also introduces the preliminary results of the experiment which was evaluated according to this methodology and proved that the syllabus was in fact effective in developing interpreting skills.

^[1] This paper is a part of a PhD. research project aimed at developing interpreting skills. The dissertation under the title Identification of Key Skills for Interpreting Studies and Their Development in the Teaching Process is to be published in the early 2021.