Students’ Perceptions of Out-of-Booth Exercises in Simultaneous Interpreting Training: A Case Study

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The proliferation of courses, masters, and degrees in which simultaneous interpreting is taught leads us to believe that the famous phrase of Jennifer Mackintosh’s book “Interpreters are made, not born” (1999) is an accurate statement. However, we believe that the teaching of simultaneous interpreting should include training outside the booth, with exercises to improve students’ performance in simultaneous interpreting. Nevertheless, as interpreter trainers, we encounter students who are eager to go directly into the booth and who are reluctant to devote part of the training hours to exercises that do not directly involve simultaneous interpreting. For this reason, the aim of our research is to study the initial perceptions of simultaneous interpreting trainees and how they change once the real usefulness of certain exercises has been verified. To this end, we performed a quantitative-qualitative research with students in the 4th year of the degree in Translation and Interpreting from two different universities and with two different language combinations, in order to offer results also on the basis of this variant. For this purpose, we conducted an initial survey and a final one after the completion of the proposed set of exercises (clozing, time lag, anticipation, improvisation and discourse analysis). We present the data obtained in terms of the complexity, usefulness and main difficulty perceived for each exercise, as well as the change of perspective experienced by the students.