Ethical issues in online interpreting training

2.1 Online interpreting training

Since interpreting competence is largely developed on the basis of training, a learning-centered approach is gaining wider recognition in the practice of interpreting teaching. Based on the description of the syllabus for university-level interpreting training designed by the China National Committee for Translation and Interpreting Education, course modules for interpreting training in most universities in China are shared by a wide range of courses, such as Chinese-English/English-Chinese Simultaneous and Consecutive Interpreting, Interpreting Theory and Practice, Interpreting Fundamentals, Business Interpreting, Conference Interpreting, Mock Conference Interpreting, Public Service Interpreting, and Professional Talks. Taking Business Interpreting as an example, the learning-centered approach well suits the needs of learners of English for Specific Purposes, since such an approach aims to meet the needs of particular learners and involves both what competence enables learners to perform and how that competence is acquired (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987). Based on observations of the actual practice of business interpreting training in many universities, in accordance with the general objectives for cultivating professional interpreters designed by the China National Committee for Translation and Interpreting Education, Figure 1 shows the essential parts involved in the Business Interpreting course. With the objective of equipping learners with basic interpreting theoretical knowledge, listening and public-speaking skills, other interpreting skills, and learning strategies, as well as the cultivation of professionalism, the implementation of the course generally involves lecturing, retelling practice, impromptu interpreting practice, listening and memorizing, note-taking, mock conference, and a real-life interpreting practicum. Although not exhaustive, these capture objectives that can actually be attained to a significant degree in the allotted time (Tyler, 1949) and within the offering of online teaching and learning. Further, various forms of interpreting training are designed in the course, including sight interpreting, consecutive interpreting, and simultaneous interpreting, to incrementally develop learners’ interpreting skills.

Figure 1:

Essential parts involved in the Business Interpreting course.

As educational activities are shifted towards online didactics, adaptations and changes have to be made to suit the needs of learners and guarantee the effect of interpreting training. Based on the practice of online synchronous interpreting courses during the pandemic, new challenges caused by adopting online teaching and training arose, and possible solutions for coping with problems need to be explored.

Delivery of online courses is based on a synchronous method by using video-conferencing platforms, such as Zoom, Zoom Pro, Microsoft Teams, or CCTalk, because these platforms have full functionalities for presenting, sharing, recording, communicating, and splitting, and most importantly the voice is clear. Besides these social platforms, some universities purchase the right to use professional interpreting platforms, such as Sanako, a remote simultaneous interpreting platform with dual-channel listening and recording functions, to enrich the student’s learning experience when teaching consecutive and simultaneous interpreting. Instructors also use LMSs such as Blackboard or Canvas to effectively manage their course materials, recordings, assignments, and assessments, as well as other social media platforms such as QQ, WeChat, or email to facilitate the interaction between instructors and students.

In response to new challenges during the pandemic, many universities have adapted to meet the needs of teaching objectives. Course modules remain mostly the same as what is included in classroom teaching, although some highly interactive teaching content is removed, such as interactive interpreting practice (Lu, 2020). The session of mock conference interpreting is delivered differently, in that some universities remove it from their teaching plans, whereas others transform it into an online mock interpreting conference (Wang, 2020). Regarding the design of teaching content, courses are designed to start with discourse analysis, source text retelling, target text retelling, and consecutive interpreting, and end with simultaneous interpreting, which allows students to develop their interpreting skills in incremental steps (Zhang & Ding, 2021). Each lecture in the course usually contains five components: lecturing, practising, commenting, demonstrating, and discussing (Lu, 2020).

In Business Interpreting online training, the instructor usually starts by introducing relevant interpreting theoretical knowledge and demonstrating examples to show how theories are applied to guide the actual interpreting practice. Following that, interpreting-related practices of various types are carried out, including impromptu interpreting practice, retelling practice, listening, and memorizing practice, sight interpreting practice, consecutive interpreting practice, and simultaneous interpreting practice. Some learners are chosen to present their interpreting version to the rest of the online class with instructors’ valuable comments and demonstration following. In addition, discussion sessions offer a great opportunity for peer learners to exchange their perceptions of difficulties encountered in the interpreting process.

Based on previous research, the transition to interpreting training seems to be a great success. Instructors invest a great amount of energy in adjusting their teaching plans to the technology-mediated online environment. As a result, most educational activities are maintained, with only a few being modified, removed, or postponed. Most students are satisfied with the online training, and some even prefer having online courses, as there are fewer distractions when they practise in front of a screen than with peers surrounding them in the classroom (Bahri, 2022; Xu et al., 2021). However, compared with traditional classroom teaching, the disadvantages of online interpreting training are obvious, and students and instructors face more ethical concerns than usual.

2.2 Challenges and concerns for ethical issues

Interpreting training is carried out following a more practice-based curriculum featuring high cognitive demands in interpreting practice and individual differences. Thus, ethical issues of equality of learning outcomes, emotional support, privacy and audio/video data protection, and misconduct behaviours should be highlighted, as they garner the attention of both instructors and students.

3.1 Technology support: professional interpreting learning platforms and electronic devices

During the pandemic, with limited options for assisting in online interpreting training, instructors frequently used social media platforms. However, these platforms cannot fully protect their users’ privacy. More frequent zoombombings have been reported (e.g. Ling et al., 2021; Secara, 2020), and some platform operators themselves can, although not intentionally, use their clients’ personal data for marketing and promotion reasons (Zoom, 2021) because clients are not aware that they have given consents to the use of their data. Given that a platform is established by a certain university for serving the goal of its own online teaching and learning only, instructors’ and students’ privacy can be better protected.

In addition, the platforms should lay emphasis on user-friendly designs that cover all functions for online interpreting training. For example, students’ voices can be exposed only to the instructor when they practice interpreting. In this case, the instructor is able to listen to each interpreting learner’s interpreting by selectively turning on and off their mic so that the students will not interfere with each other. As such, instructors can give immediate in-time feedback to every single student without having to collect students’ interpreting data, listen to all in-class interpreting recordings after class, or offer delayed feedback, which, to some extent, affects the quality of students’ learning outcomes. As some universities employ both asynchronous and synchronous teaching and learning methods in online interpreting training during the pandemic, it is also suggested that more platforms, such as the web-based collaborative cyber community (3C) learning platform (Chen et al., 2005), can be established and widely used to minimize inconvenience and improve the integrity of course delivery, learning, and management to increase instructors’ and students’ willingness to teach and learn online.

3.2 Technology support: professional software and relevant support

Interpreting, a highly complex task consisting of more than simply word-for-word translation, involves receiving information, decoding information, and encoding information combined with contextual, pragmatic, and real-world information, which proved very difficult to process. Professional software can be designed to address ethical issues concerning the interpreting process to reduce the unnecessary workload for both instructors and interpreting learners and improve efficiency, such as LMSs to effectively manage course materials, anti-plagiarism software to prevent academic dishonesty, and automatic speech analysis programmes to detect linguistic errors and fillers in students’ renditions. With such helpful academic tools, instructors are, to some extent, relieved from the heavy workload and pressure of potential ethical issues, such as academic misconduct and limited and delayed feedback for interpreting assessments.

3.3 Technology support: virtual reality

Resources are still scarce in business interpreting training. Hansen and Shlesinger (2007) described an initiative to develop video-based interpreting training using video clips that provide bilingual role-play dialogues for self-study purposes. This initiative resulted in a great improvement in student motivation and performance. In response to the lack of a real-life business interpreting practicum in online interpreting training, the application of virtual reality technology should be advocated using an avatar-based 3D virtual reality environment. Course modules with such technology can allow instructors and learners to work together and participate in various virtual business scenarios with their avatars to explore and simulate professional interpreting practices in various business interpreting settings that embed various interpreting modes, such as consecutive, simultaneous, and liaison interpreting modes. Such innovative trials have been conducted by some scholars (see Braun et al., 2013). Instructors and students can use such tools to increase their levels of trust and familiarity, and their friendship is promoted. Students will feel less uncomfortable and stressed when turning on their web cameras, and the implementation of group interpreting practices can be easier and more effective. The development of the types and languages of interpreting scenarios still remains quite limited, and relevant multimodal corpora based on various business settings of different cultural backgrounds need to be compiled to enrich the data for designing virtual-reality-based interpreting training scenarios.

3.4 Innovation in training approach: video recordings and multimodal interpreting corpus

Interpreting dies in the air. Therefore, it is hard to retrieve the information to the full for instructors to provide comprehensive feedback and monitor students’ emotional status when only audio-recording data are collected. Mayer (2005) proved that dual or multimodal learning is preferred to monomodal learning. Humans interact multimodally and learn multimodally. Multimodality has been defined by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, p. 20) as the “use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event, together with the particular way in which these modes are combined.” Hauck and Youngs (2008, p. 91) also indicated that new media offers the ability to draw on a number of different modes in the making of texts, and that much of communication is now mediated by the computer. Gu (2012, p. 6) pointed out that the internet and mobile technology have profoundly altered our way of interaction over space and time; thus, their impact on and potential for learning is massive but remains to be explored. He put forward a chess master model that involves the use of a 3-ML lab (multimodal, multimedia, and multi-environment learning research lab). The simulation of such 3-ML labs online is quite significant for interpreting training, since interpreting is multimodal in nature, involving linguistic, paralinguistic, kinesic, and extralinguistic information (Liu, 2018). Phonetic information, paralinguistic information, data on background noise, and visual information (e.g. facial expressions, gestures, spectator profiles, and the interpreting setting) all play an indispensable role in interpreting studies.

The data for interpreting learners should be collected and analysed using a multimodal annotation design to assist with online interpreting teaching and learning. Many scholars (Gu, 2013; Liu, 2012, 2018, 2020; Liu & Hu, 2015; Zhang, 2013) have attempted to collect these video data to establish their own multimodal interpreting corpus for research purposes. Such recordings contain not only the course content and students’ interpreting practice but also the behaviours of students and instructors, their interaction and reaction, and their teaching and learning environment. Therefore, ethical concerns, such as consent and privacy regarding lecture recordings, are worthy of more attention. Consent from both instructors and students should be obtained before recording lectures, as these recordings can be easily modified and spread on social media for non-academic reasons. On the one hand, consent forms can be a protection for instructors, as Deflem (2021) and Flaherty (2020) pointed out that recordings being intentionally modified without consent have caused serious outcomes for the instructor. On the other hand, students’ privacy can also be well protected. Anderson and Simpson (2007) and Newlands et al. (2020) suggested that instructors should obtain informed consent from students when they intend to record a lecture. Further, informed consent should be clear about how their data can be protected, as video-conferencing platforms such as Zoom are easily hacked (Newlands et al., 2020; Rajab & Soheib, 2021). As long as recordings are generated, students’ participation in the online course can be tracked, monitored, and analysed by the instructor (Webb et al., 2021). The use of such multimodal data should be limited to academic purposes and should not be used for commercial purposes. By means of the multimodal annotation software ELAN, instructors can appropriately make use of multimodal interpreting data by investigating the whole process of interpreting and demonstrating the relations between linguistic phenomena, behaviours, psychological status, and cognitive processes. The results of the research can, in turn, have a washback effect on interpreting teaching and learning and can guide interpreting pedagogy.

3.5 Innovation in training approach: establishment of a multimodal annotation framework

With the establishment of a multimodal annotation framework, interpreting learning can be more learner-centered as students are able to analyse their own performance comprehensively rather than fully rely on the instructor’s delayed feedback. Thus, learning outcomes can be increased.

As mentioned in Section 2.2, some learners feel embarrassed to turn on the webcam in front of instructors and other learners. Therefore, they are asked to record their own interpreting practice video data after class, analyse their own data, and write a reflection journal. Based on observations of the interpreting learners’ corpus, a multimodal annotation framework can be designed with reference to the information classification involved in interpreting corpora, as defined by Roach et al. (1998), Poyatos (2002), and Monti et al. (2005). Parameters involved in the multimodal annotation framework for interpreting learners are divided into four major types: linguistic information, paralinguistic information, kinesic information, and extra-linguistic information, which are designed to present a whole picture of the interpreting process. Figure 2 illustrates how multimodal information is annotated with ELAN software.

Figure 2:

A multimodal annotation excerpt generated by ELAN.

Instructors can be trained to use multimodal analysis software to annotate and analyse interpreting learners’ multimodal data to retrieve information involved in the English learners’ interpreting process, thus exploring relevant interpreting theories and strategies to promote the coordinated development of studies on interpreting teaching and training.

3.6 Emotional support: virtual community

In spite of the fact that asynchronous online interpreting training overcomes the constraints of time, space, and pace, instructors and students are separated in online interpreting training compared with offline interpreting training. Therefore, there is a lack of more effective on-site and real-time effective communication between instructors and students, as well as between peer learners. It is suggested to build a virtual community by using social media platforms to reduce the feeling of isolation, which is an important criterion for achieving better student satisfaction for online courses (McInnerney & Roberts, 2004). This virtual community should be established not only among students but also among instructors and between students and instructors. The virtual community offers a knowledge-sharing channel in which teaching and learning experiences, solutions for technological issues, and even non-academic issues are shared (Ren, 2020).

The virtual community is not designed to be a group chatroom; instead, students’ online interpreting training behaviours should be regulated by assigning different roles to students and designing role rotations to arouse awareness of the interdependence of roles. Such arrangements can encourage students to participate in various training activities and enable interpreting learners to experience diverse training opportunities. Professional interpreters can also be invited to join the community to cooperate with the instructor to design training activities, assign specific protocols for different roles, and share their experience in dealing with challenges when they were novice interpreters. With goals of overcoming the sense of isolation and promoting effective emotional communication by means of information exchange, resource, and experience sharing, as well as role interdependence, the sense of a shared community can be fostered among interpreting learners and instructors.