Let’s Strike a Deal! Meeting the Challenge of Undergraduate Business Interpreting Training

Abstract

Language and cultural mediation in business contexts is a clear career opportunity for Translation and Interpreting graduates in Spain, as globalised businesses increasingly value language skills. Interpreting trainers must then meet the challenge of equipping undergraduate students with the skills required to perform as competent business interpreters. Business interpreting is a complex activity that implies the ability to use different interpreting skills (dialogue interpreting, consecutive interpreting, sight translation and whispered interpreting) and acquire domain-specific knowledge (and subsequently terminology and phraseology in the two working languages). Furthermore, trainers must also very commonly face additional hurdles like few contact hours, large numbers of students and scarcity of training materials. In this paper we attempt to describe how we have risen to the challenge of business interpreter training in our undergraduate programme (in the language combination English-Spanish), chiefly by boosting autonomous practice both in groups and individually. Even though it cannot be expected that our graduates, after completing their training, are qualified to perform as business interpreters to the most professional standard, we argue that the training that we provide them with not only introduces them into business interpreting as a professional activity (which they may pursue after further training) but also equips them with skills that are highly valued on the job market and make them therefore more employable.