| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 翻譯研究所 === 97 === Given the laborious nature of interpretation testing and its scoring process, most interpretation exams adopt language proficiency tests in the first phase as a screening mechanism. However, whether or not a language proficiency test can effectively single out examinees most prone to possess interpretation abilities relies on the test design. Based on the literature, the present research assessed all test activities employed in the first phase of three of the most representative English-Chinese interpretation exams, and identified ‘spot dictation’, ‘short-answer listening comprehension with note-taking’, and ‘summary’ as potentially applicable test activities as compared to ‘verbatim dictation’ and ‘short-answer listening comprehension’. All the test activities were then administered to both ‘participants trained in interpretation’ and ‘participants never trained in interpretation’ so as to observe if differences in test activities have an impact on the participants’ performance.
The result shows ‘participants never trained in interpretation’ perform better in ‘verbatim dictation’ than in ‘spot dictation’, while ‘participants trained in interpretation’ perform equally well in both; ‘participants never trained in interpretation’ perform better in ‘short-answer listening comprehension’ than in ‘short-answer listening comprehension with note-taking’, while ‘participants trained in interpretation’ perform equally well in both; ‘participants trained in interpretation’ outperform ‘participants never trained in interpretation’ in ‘summary’ activity. It is thus argued that ‘spot dictation’, ‘short-answer listening comprehension with note-taking’, and ‘summary’ may be more applicable for screening purposes since they not only assess language abilities but reflect part of the ‘non-linguistic’ abilities required for consecutive interpretation.
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