Assessing aptitude for interpreting
Based on a review of some of the most promising approaches to aptitude testing in the literature this paper proposes a novel task piloted at the Center for Translation Studies of the University of Vienna. The SynCloze test combines an auditory cloze exercise with a task requiring high
expressional fluency, that is, rapidly finding contextually appropriate synonymic sentence completions. The rationale and design of the SynCloze test as well as the scoring method, which takes into account both the degree of accuracy and the speed of response, are described. The results of
four rounds of testing involving some 120 students in the final stage of their undergraduate studies show that the test effectively discriminates between undergraduate novices and a control group of interpreting students, and students for whom the test language (German) is the A vs. the B
language. Most significantly, the test scores correlate, albeit moderately, with students’ performance on an intralingual consecutive interpreting exam at the end of the course.
Keywords: cloze exercise; cognitive skills; selection tests; working memory
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 2011
- International Journal of Research and Practice in Interpreting
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