15 Summary of the results of the longitudinal study presented in this volume

This monograph investigated the development of C to A language consecutive interpreting competence through a longitudinal study involving four students of interpreting. The four Master’s students of interpreting involved attended a four-semester translation and interpreting MA program at the university of Szeged, Hungary. Their A language is Hungarian, B language is Spanish, and C language is English. All four students volunteered to participate in the investigation. In the course of their studies, recordings were made of their English to Hungarian consecutive interpreting at the end of semesters two, three and four. My aim was to provide a holistic analysis of the development of interpreting competence. For this purpose, both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Quantitative analyses were used to investigate the fidelity of the consecutively interpreted target language texts, the strategies used by the interpreter trainees, the ratings given by the target audience and interpreter trainers, and in mapping disfluencies, explicitation shifts and shifts of grammatical cohesion in the consecutively interpreted Hungarian target language texts. Qualitative methods were used to analyze the self-evaluative retrospective comments of the interpreter trainees and the evaluative comments of the target audience and the interpreter trainers.