Participant Recruitment and Demographic Information

In order to recruit participants, an informational email and flyer were distributed through personal and institutional networks, including professional organizations, educational

institutions, hospital interpreting services departments, and interpreting agencies. Recruiting participants proved to be difficult. A number of practicing professionals were interested in participating but did not fit the inclusion criteria for the expert group due to insufficient formal training (e.g., having sufficient experience, but only 40 hours of formal training). Despite sustained outreach to trainees currently enrolled in 40-hour programs, it was also difficult to recruit novice interpreters to participate in the study.

In the end, eight interpreters participated in the study. Five were classed as expert and three as novice interpreters. In order to collect demographic data on the participants, each interpreter was asked to complete a brief questionnaire (full text of the questionnaire may be found in Appendix C) after completing the informed consent process at the study site. In order to avoid dehumanizing the participants, each interpreter was assigned a pseudonym, which is used throughout the results and discussion.

Given the small sample size and the small pool of eligible participants from which the participants were recruited, there is a risk that detailed reporting of demographic information could allow the participating interpreters to be identified. To minimize this risk, the demographic information is reported in an aggregated fashion in Table 12. The sample can be described both as heterogeneous, in terms of training, experience, and language skills, and homogeneous, in that all the participants have the same language combination and live/work in the same geographic area.

44 Graduates of the institution at which I teach were excluded from the study.

Table 12. Study participants' demographic information.

45 Assessment of the relative strength of the participants’ languages is subjective based on their demographic reports and on observation of their performance during the simulation. No formal assessment was completed. See narrative discussion in the section following the table.

Demographic Information of Study Participants

Language profile⁴⁵: Roughly balanced...

Stronger English...

Gender was heavily skewed toward female participants, which is consistent with trends in the Interpreting Studies literature and with the United States’ Department of Labor’s 2011 statistics, which indicate that 68% of interpreters and translators in the US are female.⁴⁶ Both male

participants in this study were in the novice group. Age was fairly evenly distributed across the expert and novice groups; that is, not all the novices were younger nor all the experts older. All but one of the participants had completed a Bachelor’s degree or higher in some subject (not necessarily interpreting). Three interpreters had completed a 40-hour interpreting training program; three had completed a college-level certificate program in interpreting; and two had completed a BA- or MA-level translation and interpreting program. The interpreters had experience primarily in medical settings, although three mentioned legal and one educational settings.

To check on their fit with the inclusion criteria for experience, the demographic questionnaire asked the interpreters to indicate how long they had worked as interpreters and approximately how many days a week they worked as interpreters. Due to a misunderstanding, one of the interpreters in the expert group met the criteria for amount of training but did not meet the requirements with regard to length of experience. Additionally, while all three novices fit the stated criteria for length of experience, one had more experience than the other two (one year of occasional freelance work vs less than six months of occasional freelance work).⁴⁷

The language profile of the participants was varied. Half of the participants were born in the United States, and half were born in a Spanish-speaking country. They had varying lengths and contexts of exposure to both languages (e.g., learning both languages from a young age;

immigrating to the United States at a young age). Observation of their language use during performance led to a subjective assessment that 4 of the 8 participants had roughly balanced skills in both languages, while three had much stronger English skills and one had somewhat stronger Spanish skills. While the interpreters’ level of fluency in their working languages was not a focus of the research, a subjective assessment of language proficiency is included in the

46 US Department of Labor statistics accessed 27 April, 2017 at https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.htm

47 Although the inclusion criteria for novices was 200 hours, it proved difficult for interpreters to estimate the number of hours they had worked. During the informed consent process, I engaged in conversation with each interpreter about how many hours per week, on average, they worked, in order to get a sense of whether they met the criteria or not. In this context, it is important to note that an interpreter working only 5 hours a week would take 40 weeks to reach the 200 hour mark, as well as the fact that dialogue interpreting work involves a large amount of waiting/non-interpreting time—an interpreter may be booked for an hour-long appointment that involves only 20-30 minutes of interpreting. The proportion of time-on-task may be even less in some situations, such as an emergency room visit or a surgery.

demographic information given that language proficiency appears to have played a role in some aspects of some of the interpreters’ performances (and, thus, in some aspects of the findings).