ABSTRACT
Quality is a key concept in interpreting studies, but there is as yet no consensus on what it is, what criteria should be used to define it and how these criteria might be objectively evaluated. Interpreting quality is ultimately a multifaceted and complex concept that acquires different meanings in different communicative situations, settings and modalities, including conference, community, court, business and sign language interpreting. Practitioners initially resorted to their own experience, mostly of consecutive interpreting, to address practical aspects of quality. An important shift took place in the 1960s and 1970s, when psychologists conducted empirical studies of interpreting and tried to measure quality solely in terms of the transfer of linguistic information and lexical substitution. Buhler’s empirical study on quality expectations in conference interpreting attempted to examine the construct of quality in operational terms, by breaking it down into specific components. Collados Ais’s study focused on a single criterion of quality, namely intonation.
