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Although dialects of a single language could distinctly differ from each other, including their common language, very little is known about interpreters’ comprehensibility of a dialect and the accuracy of interpreting performance of which source language is in the dialect. This paper reports on the findings of an investigation that explored the accuracy of a consecutive interpreting performance from the Jeju dialect that was performed by Jeju dialect speaking interpreters and non-Jeju dialect interpreters. By using a meaning unit-based quality assessment, the accuracy of interpreting performances between the two groups were compared. The results show that the non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters’ performances were significantly inaccurate with the majority of the information in the source text either being omitted or distorted whereas Jeju dialect speaking interpreters’ performances achieved acceptable accuracy. The incomprehensibility of Jeju dialect seems to be attributed to the inaccurate performances of the non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters, largely due to unfamiliar words. Although both groups used the same strategy (omissions and making inferences) to cope with incomprehension issues, the effectiveness of the strategies was limited because non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters were confused by the unique phonetic, morphologic, and lexical features of the dialect.

As fluency is considered an important part of interpreting quality, it is important for interpreters to be able to control pauses and hesitations. In this context, this study investigated patterns of pauses and motivations for pauses in consecutive interpreting into Korean and English. In the study, ten first-year students in a graduate program of interpretation and translation performed consecutive interpreting in both directions and participated in retrospective interviews to comment on reasons for pauses in their performance. The findings suggest that there were more occurrences of pauses in unnatural places in interpreting into English than the other direction. As for the motivations for pauses, in the K-E direction, linguistic difficulties, such as searching for appropriate expressions in English and restructuring target language outputs, were most frequently cited by the participants. In the E-K direction, not only linguistic factors but also extra-linguistic factors, including note-reading and checking for logical flows, caused the participants to pause and hesitate during interpreting. The paper discusses major findings and their pedagogical implications.

Notetaking is a useful skill that assists an interpreter with their memory in consecutive interpreting. However, the useful tool may pose a major obstacle to interpreter trainees. There is a considerable amount of research available that provides general knowledge and specific examples of what and how to note (Lee 2013, Gillies 2017). Yet, the research does not seem to provide enough resources in support of notetaking; and some researchers even suggest employing the task is mostly personal preference (Choi 1998/2004: 91, Jones 1998/2002). This noticeable divide in perspective and lack of explicit illustrations posit a need for additional exploration on the topic. Particularly, meaning – not words – is paramount in taking notes (Choi 1998/2004: 82), which should be specifically presented in a systematic manner. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) prioritizes “meaning” in analyzing language. The purpose for this study is to provide trainees with a method of notetaking using SFL. The study has two parts: one is to create a notetaking strategy employing SFL’s meaning-based classification of verbs; the second part is to validate the theory by analyzing trainees’ test results. In SFL, verbs are considered the key constituent in a clause (Butt et al. 2000) and, in English, they are categorized into six groups (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014). These six groups are the basis from which the criteria and guidelines for writing verbs are derived. Part one of this study explores using SFL’s verb classification in notetaking.

Fluency management is a persistent challenge in interpreter training, particularly when students work into a B language. This study investigates how syntactic complexity in the target text (TT) affects disfluency in Korean-to-English consecutive interpreting by student interpreters. While previous research has examined cognitive load and general fluency, few studies have explored TT sentence complexity as a predictor of disfluency patterns. Drawing on data fromsix student interpreters, this study analyses disfluency frequency and type across sentences classified by Mean Dependency Distance (MDD). The findings show that TT syntactic complexity is positively associated with overall disfluency, with silent pauses most consistently affected, followed by fillers and self-repairs, while repetitions showed no reliable pattern. This relationship was confirmed through both linear and non-parametric analyses, revealing how specific disfluency types reflect structural processing strain. By focusing on a typologically distant language pair and analysing disfluency at the sentence level, the study adds empirical depth to fluency research in interpreting. It also offers pedagogical implications for helping trainees manage TT complexity more strategically during B language production.

This paper aims to identify the sub-competences needed for consecutive interpreting in various communication conditions and develop an appropriate training model for strengthening the strategic sub-competence. For this, sub-competences including the strategic sub-competence for consecutive interpreting were defined. Considering that the strategic sub-competence covers situation analysis, problem solving as well as coordinating all the other sub-competences according to communication conditions, specific consecutive interpreting conditions were identified and classified. In addition, domestic consecutive interpreting demand for the past two years was collected and expert interviews were conducted to identify the specific condition factors worth covering in order to develop an effective and efficient training model. A model composed of three types of distinct conditions was developed and applied. Surveys conducted after each application reveal that the training model is effective in making students more conscious about different interpreting conditions and in developing their strategic competence.

This paper deals with notetaking skills which are key elements of consecutive interpreting performance and reports findings from a pilot study on interpreters’ consecutive interpreting with notes. With a view to contributing to consecutive interpreting training, this paper discusses basic principles in notetaking and some effective notetaking skills that may contribute to the enhancement ofinterpreting performance. The pilot study examines five interpreters’ consecutive interpreting performances and their notes taken with a Smartpen. The findings suggest three types of efficient notetaking skills. First, interpreters need to adopt dynamic notetaking. Dynamic notetaking refers to taking additional notes swiftly not necessarily following the left-to-right and top-down movement, storing temporarily key information in their working memory while catching up with the source text. Second, interpreters need to take a note of the syntactic structure of the source text in order to effectively reproduce a complicated or convoluted sentence. Third, interpreters need to use symbols in a consistent manner in order to avoid confusion and misinterpretation. Just as the use of a Smartpen enabled the researchers to analyse the subjects’ notetaking in real time, the Smartpen is expected to be a useful tool for teaching and training notetaking skills. Given the limitations of research methodology, it would be worthwhile to examine if training these skills leads to the enhancement of consecutive interpreting performance through a large scale experimental study.

This paper attempts to bring attention to contributions that text analysis may provide for improving students’ performance in an accreditation test. The paper takes an example of the Australian interpreting accreditation system, one of the exemplary accreditation institutions in the world (Hale et al., 2012: 10). The Australian case may be of use to the Korean interpreting circles that have had an increased interest in recent years in adopting its own interpreting accreditation system (e.g. Park 2016). Of all the different contributors that help determine success in the test, including language ability and cognitive efficiency, text analysis seems to also have a significant role to play in increasing students’ chance of success in the test. As a theoretical framework, this paper uses Systemic Functional Linguistics’ method of thematic development and grammatical metaphor. The main data includes two English source texts and eight students’ consecutive interpreting of those texts. The students’ interpreting was drawn from recordings and notes taken during their accreditation exams. The findings of the analysis show that, while successful test-takers handled zig-zag patterns and grammatical metaphors without serious issues, unsuccessful students missed, deleted and/or mistranslated the aforementioned elements that affected the comprehensive interpretation.

This paper explores alternative pedagogical approaches for undergraduateconsecutive interpreting courses. A number of approaches are discussed,including traditional learning, individualistic learning and cooperative learning. The pros and cons of the three approaches are discussed and are adapted tothe context of interpreting classes. Different combinations of the threeapproaches are applied to two different consecutive interpreting courses basedon needs analysis and course characteristics including directionality. For theBA consecutive interpreting course, traditional learning, individualisticlearning, and cooperative learning are applied. For the AB consecutiveinterpreting course, traditional learning and cooperative learning are applied. At the end of the course, a survey was conducted to understand students’perceptions on the alternative approaches. Overall, students were satisfiedwith the three approaches. The disadvantages of individual approaches couldbe complemented by combining different approaches together. Based on thefindings of the survey and class observations, this paper proposes alternativepedagogies of consecutive interpreting that facilitate motivation,interdependence, individual responsibility, and cooperation.

Public speaking skills are essential to improving student interpreters’ consecutive interpreting performance. Student performance was video recorded for a semester and weekly assessed by the students as a tool to help trainee interpreters demonstrate a critical awareness of extra-linguistic aspects ofspeech, i.e. delivery problems, and improve presentation skills. A 6-point scale assessment sheet was employed based on two main criteria: body language and vocal behavior. A survey was also conducted towards the end of the semester to understand how the students evaluated the video-aided classroom and to reveal further data on students’ consecutive interpreting delivery. Whereas no significant improvement in students’ public speaking skills was manifested, students responded very positively to the trial, suggesting benefits and didactic approaches for further studies.

Lee, Jieun & Chang, Won Kyung. 2015. A Case Study of Court Interpreters’ Consecutive Interpreting Performances. Journal of Linguistic Studies 20(1), 99-118. This study assessed the interpreting skills of interpreters currently registered with courts, who are referred to as court interpreters in this paper. Thirteen court interpreters’ consecutive interpreting performance was analyzed. After a warm-up exercise, the interpreters, including seven Chinese interpreters and six English interpreters, were asked to interpret recorded speeches with varying degrees of difficulties. The Korean source texts they interpreted were judges’ sentencing with slight modification, adjusted for consecutive interpreting. The interpreters’ interpreting was recorded and then transcribed for analysis. The interpretation was assessed in terms of the accuracy of contents, target language quality and delivery. The results revealed that all the participants have failed to demonstrate sufficient consecutive interpreting skills to deliver accurate interpreting, often mistranslating and producing awkward expressions. The findings suggest that non-Korean speaking defendants may have difficulties with accessing the court and communicating effectively through the interpreters. This paper concludes that court interpreters should be selected based on interpreting skills and that pre-service training is essential for the improvement of the quality of court interpreting. (Ewha Womans University)

Interpreter training programs had shunned online training courses in preference for in-person courses because technical problems and limited interactions have cast doubt about the effectiveness of online training. However, the pandemic-induced public health risks and the advancement of video conferencing technology seem to have changed the landscape of online classes. Interpreter trainers, having experienced online training during the pandemic, have had opportunities to compare two modes of interpreter training, online and in-person. This paper examines online and in-person classroom interactions in consecutive interpreting training, focusing on corrective feedback. The study throws some light on the similarities and differences between the two modes of interpreting classes through quantitative and qualitative analyses of classroom discourse. The quantitative analysis indicates that turn takings in in-person classes far outnumber those in online classes, but the qualitative analysis through the analysis of classroom discourse reveals little difference in terms of feedback interactions per se. The findings suggest that depending on the training context, the online interpreter training can also serve as an effective training mode, and call for further research.

This study investigates the predictive power of vocabulary breadth(receptive and productive) and depth(synonym and allocation) knowledge for AB and BA consecutive interpreting performance of undergraduate and graduate students in Korean-English Translation and Interpretation programs. Three vocabulary knowledge measuring instruments were administered to 39 students: Nation's Vocabulary Size Test Version A, Laufer & Nation (1999)'s vocabulary size test for controlled productivity version A, 10,000 level, and Read's Word Associates Test. Scores of these tests along with the students' AB and BA consecutive interpreting scores were collected and simple linear and multiple regression analyses were performed. The analyses showed that students’ B language vocabulary knowledge scores combined accounted for 43% of their BA consecutive interpreting scores and 79% of their AB consecutive interpreting scores. When analyzed independently, the receptive vocabulary size was found to have the largest predictive power for both BA and AB consecutive interpreting. A closer look at the results shows that the predictive power of vocabulary knowledge is influenced by the directionality of interpreting. Vocabulary knowledge of the target language as opposed to the source language of interpreting (i.e. vocabulary knowledge of English for Korean-English interpreting) was found to be a much stronger predictor of the consecutive interpreting performance than vice versa. The implications of the findings on interpreting education is discussed.

With the development of machine translation technology, the competitiveness of human interpreter needs to be further strengthened. In light of this, translating nonverbal message is more important than ever. Just like the speakers who make full use of nonverbal communication, interpreter also needs to pay attention to the importance of nonverbal communication. Of all the kinesics, the most frequently used is the hand gesture. The purpose of this paper is to compare and analyze the hand gesture of the speaker and that of the interpreter. For this reason, this paper set two questions. First, what hand the speaker and the interpreter use during consecutive interpreting for business presentation? Second, is the interpreter influenced by the speaker’s hand gesture? What is the difference or similarity between the hand gesture of the speaker and the interpreter? This paper attempts to analyze the hand gestures of both the speaker and the interpreter. The theoretical background for this analysis consists in the types of hand gesture invented by Morris. On the basis of hand gesture, three hand signals are described—deictic signals, baton signals, symbolic signals. The results are as follow: When the speaker and the interpreter explain the content of PowerPoint, they both use deictic signals or baton signals, and when describing specific words, they use similar symbolic signals. It is worth noting that if the speaker’s message is accompanied with hand gesture, the interpreter is ready to interpret the message with the same hand gesture. This means that the speaker's hand gesture influences the hand gesture of the interpreter, thus affecting the formation of message. This paper is limited to one case, so the scope of its research objects needs to be expanded. This paper demonstrates that interpreter uses the similar or different hand gesture as the speaker does and interpreter’s hand gesture would play an active role in the process of interpreting.

In this paper, the results of the certification examination for court interpreters were analyzed to investigate how different evaluation criteria impact overall scores based on the examinees' score ranges. The findings revealed that, regardless of the interpreting mode, examinees who scored below 70 points (failing) were most significantly affected by the fluency of the target language. In dialogue interpreting, low target language fluency resulted in poor outcomes, independent of other factors. Once target language fluency was achieved, faithfulness to the original message became the primary factor influencing the results. In consecutive interpreting, note-taking proficiency was found to have a substantial impact on performance. Unlike dialogue interpreting, where note-taking was not required, candidates who were less familiar with the note-taking process tended to struggle, even with target language fluency. This suggests that note-taking proficiency played a critical role in consecutive interpreting. For sight translation, the ability to naturally convey specialized terms and expressions determined pass or fail outcomes. Although sight translation does not rely heavily on memory, faithfulness to the content still played a significant role in the success of candidates scoring above 70 points, indicating frequent omissions or mistranslations among lower-scoring candidates.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation and virtual collaboration, leading to a surge in demand for distance interpreting in the interpreting services market. This study aims to compare non-verbal elements in distance consecutive interpreting with those in face-to-face consecutive interpreting, focusing on identifying key learning components for distance interpreting. The analysis involves recorded videos of students interpreting in a consecutive interpreting class conducted online via Zoom over one semester at the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation. It also includes teacher feedback provided to the students and survey results on their satisfaction with and the perceived advantages and disadvantages of video feedback. The study compared the videos to evaluate improvements in non-verbal skills following teacher feedback on recorded performances. The findings indicate that non-verbal skills improved during and by the end of the semester, compared to the initial feedback on remote consecutive interpreting performances. Based on these observations, this paper discusses the significance of key learning elements in distance consecutive interpreting training.

Although note-taking inarguably plays an important part in consecutive interpreting, prescriptive teaching of note-taking strategies can be challenging as the technique remains highly individual and requires practice. The constructivist approach has thus been embraced by a handful of researchers in the last few years to encourage group work and help students maximize learning outcomes. This study incorporates this recent direction in note-taking research to explore how students co-construct note-taking knowledge. Six note-taking techniques adapted from Rozan – verticality, nuance markers, symbols and abbreviations, noting the idea, links and logical connections, dynamic note-taking – were used as first year T&I graduate students engaged in constructivist classroom discussions and activities over the course of six weeks. Students’ experiences were captured in the form of journals and survey, which hinted at continued integration of new knowledge with the existing ones. As students engaged in group exercises designed to encourage inquiry-based learning and personal reflection, prior knowledge was brought to the learning process, thereby enabling students to shape and reshape their own concepts of note-taking. This study is expected to prompt interpreter trainers and learners to explore new possibilities for teaching and learning note-taking, thereby encouraging new knowledge formation.

Since diplomatic relations between Korea and China normalized in 1992, there has been an overwhelming increase in the number of interpreters and translators that connect speakers of the two countries. However, during the Korean-Chinese consecutive interpretation process, it is common to encounter literal expressions that reproduce the syntactic structure of Korean as it is or awkward expressions that impede the comprehension of the listener. However, there are not many studies that focus on this issue. This study recognized this problem and analyzed errors based on 560 texts from 40 graduates of the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation in order to provide practical data to the Korean-Chinese consecutive interpretation education field. In order to examine the types of rhetorical errors that appear in the results of learners of Korean-Chinese consecutive interpretation, errors were classified into word rhetoric, phrase rhetoric, sentence rhetoric, and text rhetoric according to the rhetoric structure. The appropriateness of active phonology was considered as well. This paper aims to provide practical and educational material that can be used in the field of consecutive interpretation education from Korean to Chinese.

Sharon Choi became an instant celebrity in both Korea and beyond as the videos of her eloquent English interpreting for the Academy-winning Parasite’s director Bong Joon-Ho, went viral on social media. The study aims to explore the possibility and implication of using Sharon Choi’s interpreting case for education purpose, although she is a non-professional or a non-certified interpreter. Using the videos of Sharon Choi’s interpreting on social media, 53 graduate students majoring in interpretation and translation in Korea participated in survey, which was conducted to look into how students evaluated Sharon Choi’s interpreting at the beginning of semesters of 2020. The survey results show that Sharon Choi helped students to better understand the role of interpreter and interpreter competence for outstanding consecutive interpreting service, despite her limitation as a non-professional interpreter. The survey has also provided unique opportunity for discussion on the conditions for successful interpreting as well as competitive edge students should have as they launch and continue their training at an accredited graduate school to become professional interpreters and translators.

In the process of interpreting from Korean, an article-less language, to languages with articles such as English, the interpreter needs to determine the definiteness of noun phrases in the source text and employ appropriate articles in the target text, which poses additional linguistic and cognitive challenges to the interpreter. In this study, student interpreters performed consecutive interpreting, and their transcripts were analyzed to examine how they rendered nominal referents from Korean to English in terms of definiteness. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of data show that the participants tended to avoid using articles, whenever possible, in the required contexts and employed other determiners such as possessives and demonstratives. Most of the uses of such determiners were judged either unacceptable or replaceable with articles. Detailed patterns in the interpretation of definiteness from Korean to English and their pedagogical implications are discussed.

This paper intended to do a descriptive study of the ethics in the interpreting activities for the political and diplomatic fields in China and Korea. The description of on-site actual ethics is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of consecutive interpreting data from 10 political and diplomatic occasions from 2003 to 2013. The ethics of source-target language relations are described through inter-textual comparison between source texts (ST) and target texts (TT). The description of the ethics in on-site interpreting yields findings in the following aspects: Through inter-textual analysis of ST-TT parallel corpus, three categories of shifts are discovered, including Type A "Addition", Type R "Reduction", Type C "Correction". The analysis showed that the three categories of shifts were representing the core meaning of the source text. Simply put, in the interpreting activities, the interpreter used the strategies of "Addition", "Reduction" and "Correction" to provide better interpretation services and deliver the core meaning of the speech very well. Not only "Equal", but also these three categories of shifts are also ethical behaviors. The interpreters used them in order to achieve the purpose of the inter-culture communication.