Clients’ Quality Expectations in Malaysian Conference Interpreting

Abstract

As part of an unpublished doctoral thesis on “Conference Interpreting in Malaysia”, this paper reports clients’ expectations and highlights the necessity of taking what they anticipate as ideal into consideration. The study tailored on-site and off-site questionnaire-based survey study in Malaysian conference interpreting setting. The relative importance of various quality criteria attached by 42 clients as well as their responses to open-ended questions, adopted from the established questionnaires, revealed the interpreting clients’ perspectives and expectations from interpreting quality. The analysis of data by scale analysis and codification of the open-ended responses into matrices showed that different clients might have different expectations. Clients rated terminology as the most important quality criterion and native accent as the least important. The most interesting aspect of interpreting profession was international contacts, while they rated speed and time constraints as the most difficult aspect of conference interpreting. Interpreters’ lack of faithfulness to the original was indicated as the principal shortcoming, whereas incorrect terminology and unfinished sentences were the most irritating aspects of conference interpreting in clients’ point of view.Their suggestions to improve quality were mostly interpreter-related such as training interpreters and updating their knowledge, as well as organisationalrelated aspects like cooperation of the clients, interpreters, conference organisers, and users.