Joining Forces for Quality Assessment in Simultaneous Interpreting: the NTR Model

Abstract

Quality in simultaneous interpretation (SI) has always been an elusive concept, and the literature has usually argued that it is not easy to establish a valid instrument for the assessment of any interpretation assignment. The provision of accessibility services for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in live audiovisual subtitling, however, has routinely demanded quality assessment procedures of both the intralingual and interlingual live subtitles shown on the screen. In speech-to-text interpreting (STTI), which includes both intra- and interlingual respeaking (i.e. live subtitling without and with translation respectively), the NTR Model was proposed for the assessment of interlingual respeaking (Romero-Fresco & Pöchhacker, 2017). The purpose of this contribution is (i) to argue why the NTR Model might be conceptually valid for the assessment of SI, (ii) to present the results of a small-scale analysis of an SI task evaluated with four instruments aimed at scrutinizing the benefits of this Model and its applicability to SI, and (iii) to advocate for the use of objective assessment systems for student and professional performance in SI.