Mária Bakti: The development of interpreting competence
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5 Methodological challenges of researching interpreting
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5.1 Problems and possible solutions

5.1 Problems and possible solutions

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There are several, interpreting-specific issues related to researching interpreting.

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  1. There is no broad social interest in or expectations towards research and related results.
  2. In addition, interpreting is a complex research object, as there are numerous variables to be taken into consideration during research design.
  3. Authentic interpreting events are not easily accessible for researchers, as most of the events are sensitive or confidential.
  4. To complicate the situation even further, the community of interpreters is relatively small, which makes the selection of a representative sample rather difficult. In addition, professional interpreters in general are reluctant to participate in research.
  5. A gap seems to exist between theory and practice; namely that practicing interpreters are not interested in the academic investigation of their output.
  6. A further issue is that of ecological validity. Authentic conference recordings have the advantage that the target language texts were recorded in a real conference setting, however, in these cases it is problematic to get the approval of interpreters, organisers and the source language speakers. In addition, these recordings do not allow the controlled investigation of different variables, however, these recordings have ecological validity, in other words, they allow a holistic investigation of the interpreting process (Shlesinger, 2000, pp. 5–6). In contrast, if one wishes to carry out a controlled examination of selected variables, it is only possible through recordings made in a language laboratory. In this setting all the participants work with an identical source language speech. It has to be added, though, that often the case is that the interpreters listen to a pre-recorded video or audio file, which poses further problems vis-à-vis ecological validity. Interpreting in a language lab is unnatural for interpreters for many reasons: they do not necessarily see the speaker, and there is no target language audience present (Gile, 1998).
  7. Quantifying data. It is very difficult to measure how well the source language message was rendered in the target language (see for example Setton 1999, who states that interpreters work based on their mental model, and not solely based on the source language text.)

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In order to solve these problems, Gile (1998) offers a number of solutions.

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One possible solution is to compare results from research based on authentic conference recordings and recordings made in a language laboratory. As concerns small samples, a possible solution is to compare the performance of professional interpreters and trainee interpreters. Another possibility is to replicate the investigation, or to use corpora already compiled and published (Gile, 1998). As a consequence of small sample size, Gile recommends the use of descriptive statistics (Gile, 1998, p. 86).
 
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