Sight Translation as a Means to Test Simultaneous Interpreting Ability of ndergraduate Translation Students

Sight translation is the act of reading and rendering a text simultaneously into speech. This mode of interpreting has been widely investigated in interpreting studies. Yet, it has rarely been applied as a means to test the other modes of interpreting. This article aims to investigate the relationship between sight translation and simultaneous interpreting abilities of undergraduate translation students, to realize if sight translation can be used a s a means to test simultaneous interpreting or not. To this end, 39 junior and senior undergraduate translation students participated in this study. Homogeneity of the research sample in terms of their listening comprehension ability was investigated by administrating to them the listening section of TOEFL PBT. Finally, the test-takers took sight translation and simultaneous interpreting tests. In the first test, the test-takers simultaneously rendered three one-minute episodes of VOA Special News, into Persian; and in the second test, they sight translated three short tape scripts of the same News series into Persian. Their performance on the two tests was scored by two raters based on the seven-category framework of interpreting errors proposed by Gonzales et al (1991), and a high inter-rater reliability was achieved. The obtained Pearson Correlation results revealed a significant direct relationship between the two sets of scores. The main implication of the study is that sight translation can be used as a means to test the simultaneous interpreting ability of undergraduate translation learners in case their upper intermediate level of listening comprehension ability is assumed.