Simultaneous Interpreting Quality Assessment at the Higher Arab Institute of Translation from Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives

Abstract

his dissertation is an exploratory study of the process of assessment practices of simultaneous interpreting quality (SIQ) at the Higher Arab Institute of Translation (HAIT) from teachers' and students' perspectives. It delves into the perceptions, views and opinions of the teachers and students alike regarding the procedures of quality assessment of simultaneous interpreting along the process of training, i.e. from the Admission Test to graduation. It aims at generating hypotheses on quality assessment issues for further research in this field in order to improve the teaching of simultaneous interpreting in this Institute and elsewhere. This research looks into the scoring of the Admission Test, the Interpreter Aptitude Test and the formal Exams of Simultaneous Interpreting against the principles of educational assessment, namely validity, reliability, authenticity, practicality in addition to fairness, usefulness and meaningfulness. It is based on a post-positivist paradigm and a mixed-methods approach, and it is mainly qualitative as it does not just deal with the statistical data, i.e. the numbers, but with the subjective experience of the respondents. It relies on the methods of case study, grounded theory and a questionnaire-based survey. As far as the results are concerned, they have revealed, on the one hand, the lack of teachers' awareness about how to construct and design valid, reliable and authentic educational tests and exams. On the other hand, the results revealed a mismatch between the perspectives of the teachers, who are professionals, and those of the students regarding the skills and criteria of assessment in almost all the tests and exams.