Summarization Exercises in E-Interpreting Training

Abstract

Summarization is widely used as an exercise both in traditional interpreting training and in distance or e-interpreting training to promote trainees' efficiency in comprehension and recall of the source language information. So far, however, how student interpreters' performance in summarization exercises relates to their interpreting performance remains unclear, let alone how the relationship may differ at different interpreting training stages. The current study thus invited 62 beginner student interpreters (Group 1) and 19 intermediate student interpreters (Group 2), examining and comparing how they performed in a task of consecutive interpreting from L2 (in this case English) to L1 (in this case Chinese) and how they performed in a post-interpreting summarization task. With quantitative analyses three major findings were obtained: (1) Group 2 had significantly better performance in interpreting than Group 1, while the two groups were not significantly different in their performance in summarization; (2) Either group's summarization performance was significantly and positively correlated with their overall score in interpreting and with the target language grammaticality and appropriateness (one of the two interpreting sub-scores) as well; however, a significant correlation between summarization performance and information accuracy and completeness (the other interpreting sub-score) was only found in Group 1 but not in Group 2; (3) Group 1's summarization performance significantly explained more than 20% variance in either the overall interpreting performance or the sub-score information accuracy and completeness, and either group's summarization performance significantly explained no less than 20% variance in the target language grammaticality and appropriateness. Pedagogical implications are discussed.