ABSTRACT
Interpreting competence refers to a set of knowledge and skills that are required for an interpreter to perform an interpreting task. The task of interpreting requires more than bilingual skills, given that to understand the source language message and reexpress it in an appropriate target language, interpreters must draw on contextual, situational and world knowledge and use their memory as efficiently as possible in order to process both the details and the macrostructure of the source text. A number of models of interpreting competence have been proposed by interpreting scholars, who have approached the concept from different perspectives. In Pöchhacker’s model, linguistic transfer competence appears as the core, complemented by cultural competence and interaction management skills. These may be viewed as context-dependent elements which interact with and are shaped by professional role performance skills and ethical standards. Strategic subcompetence, which is regarded as the most important subcompetence in models of translation competence, has been under-researched in interpreting studies.
