Interpreting and Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal

This article navigates the complexity of the humanitarian system, the potential of the humanitarian-development nexus, and the commitments of the World Humanitarian Summit of 2016 as a backdrop to designing sustainable interpreter training programmes. It argues that these programmes must be locally designed to respond to real needs and developed and implemented by local actors living and working in the contexts where building trained interpreter capacity is essential to the success of the humanitarian agenda. It further highlights the crucial importance of decolonising aid and empowering local actors in efforts to advance the cause and quality of multilingual communication in crisis contexts. Two case studies from conflict-affected regions in the Middle East and East Africa—Jordan and Kenya—illustrate how cross-cutting issues from national, regional and international politics, humanitarian agendas, international aid, Higher Education in Emergencies, and country-specific policy agendas inform the design, development, and implementation of university-level training programmes in humanitarian interpreting.

Cumulative motion injuries and burnout contribute to an international shortage of signed language interpreters (SLIs). Studies using the Job Content Questionnaire, a well-validated measure of occupational health risks, indicate that risk levels differ among SLI work settings. Specifically, video relay service (VRS) and primary and secondary educational settings (K–12) are associated with greater health risks. The current study validated those results by analysing the diurnal rhythm of salivary cortisol levels. Anomalies in diurnal cortisol rhythms are associated with an array of health problems. Our full-time SLI participants included VRS workers (N = 20), K–12 workers (N = 18), and SLIs who worked in other settings (N = 23). Non-interpreters using sign language daily at work (N = 18) comprised a fourth group. Saliva samples were collected four times daily over 2 working days. The VRS and K–12 SLIs demonstrated lower morning peak cortisol levels and flatter diurnal cortisol slopes from morning peak to subsequent diminution. Both findings are associated with chronic stress and greater health risks. The VRS and K–12 groups’ diurnal cortisol patterns closely resembled each other, while the Other SLI group’s curve closely resembled that of the Non-Interpreter group. Implications for SLI health, education, and job redesign are discussed in the context of the demand control schema.

Through the lens of assemblage thinking and “territorialisation,” this article examines the operationalisation of language support by the voluntary sector in the Thorney Island and Sopley camps, which temporarily accommodated Vietnamese refugee arrivals in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on archival sources, the role and agency of interpreters are foregrounded in an analysis of the relationships between the materiality of the camps, camp practices, and their impact on refugee experience. A post-camp initiative to train refugees as parasocial workers (a role that included interpreting) reveals a more person-centred approach, in contrast to what we have termed a solutionist approach to interpreting observed in the camps.

Assessment of interpreting quality is a ubiquitous social practice in the interpreting industry and academia. In this article, we focus on both psychometric and social dimensions of assessment practice, and analyse two major assessment paradigms, namely, human rater scoring and automatic machine scoring. Regarding human scoring, we describe five specific methods, including atomistic scoring, questionnaire-based scoring, multi-methods scoring, rubric scoring, and ranking, and critically analyse their respective strengths and weaknesses. In terms of automatic scoring, we highlight four assessment approaches that have been researched and operationalised in cognate disciplines and interpreting studies, including automatic assessment based on temporal variables, linguistic/surface features, machine translation metrics, and quality estimation methodology. Finally, we problematise the socio-technological tension between these two paradigms and envisage human–machine collaboration to produce psychometrically sound and socially responsible assessment. We hope that this article sparks more scholarly discussion of rater-mediated and automatic assessment of interpreting quality from a psychometric-social perspective.