“If we’re lucky, we recognise potential.” A study of admission criteria and entrance screening practices in public service interpreter training

ABSTRACT

The growing demand for language mediation across different domains of public service interpreting (PSI) poses a challenge for policymakers, stakeholders (institutional representatives, clients), and traditional interpreter education institutions. Alongside university-based interpreter education, different training formats have emerged internationally to meet the increased need for training. Based on a systematic review of extra-university training formats in Austria, this contribution presents the results of a qualitative follow-up study drawing upon data from semi-structured interviews with providers. The aim was to investigate whether entrance assessment procedures are employed by course providers when selecting course participants, and, if so, which they are and what motives lie behind providers’ decisions for particular admission procedures. Our study shows that while there is considerable commitment to offering customer-tailored courses to heterogeneous groups of trainees, the training formats differ and there seems to be little communication among providers regarding the establishment and adequacy of different formats for student selection.

KEYWORDS:

• Public service interpreting
• interpreter training and education
• assessment
• entrance criteria

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The qualitative content analysis served to obtain a first impression of how criteria and procedures for course admission, among other aspects, are communicated to applicants or other stakeholders, and how much weight is given to admission procedures among other factors. Our corpus of written course documents included curricula, information leaflets, FAQs, and homepage content. At the time of corpus compilation, except for R-BZ, all providers offered basic information both on their websites and through information leaflets and flyers, which indicates a general awareness of the need for marketing and promoting one’s training offers. The most detailed and complete information was provided for W-ULG and W-ULG (MA). Across the material, information on the specifics of course admission is eclectic, except for W-ULG, which provides detailed information, not only on the required level of language proficiency but also on the test format, preparation for this test, and an example for a test. Two of the courses (L-Plus and R-BZ), do not provide any admission-related information. The remainder of the providers mention language proficiency; most, however, except for G-UK1, do not specify how this criterion is tested. Experience in interpreting is also mentioned, though in none of the material do applicants find information on how to prove experience.

2. For a recent overview of dialogue interpreting courses in Austria, including SL and court interpreter training, see Pöllabauer et al. (2021). The content of this overview has recently been digitised and can be accessed under https://dialogdolmetschendatenbank.at.

3. The QUADA course has recently been relaunched and renamed to “Lehrgang Dolmetschen (Asyl- und Polizeibereich), see https://vhs.at/dolmetschen. The course focus now also includes police interpreting; entrance prerequisites remain the same (personal information, VHS.lernraum.wien). Also, other courses may have initiated changes which are not reflected in this data set.

4. All interview passages were translated from German into English by the authors.