Aptitude for interpreting The abilities and skills required for interpreting have been a topic of special inter est ever since the very first scientific investigation into the professional occupation of conference interpreting by Jesus Sanz (1930). In the 1960s and 1970s, AIIC, the International Association of Conference Interpreters, made serious efforts to tackle this issue and come to a better understanding of the prerequisites for a ca reer in professional interpreting (see Keiser 1978). Attempts to put the selection of candidates for interpreter training on a more scientific footing have been made since the 1980s, often drawing on insights from cognitive psychology (e.g. Moser Mercer 1985). And yet, relatively little empirical research on aptitude for inter preting has been carried out to date, despite recurrent doubts over the reliability, validity and predictive power of tasks designed to test candidates for interpreter training programs (e.g. Dodds 1990). What is more, those studies that do exist do not yet provide us with sufficient guidance on the effective screening of applicants. This dearth of evidence-based methods of admission testing is all the more prob lematic when one considers the growing demand for highly qualified interpreters as training institutions face increasing pressure to make the most efficient and judicious use of their limited resources. It was against this backdrop that an initiative to organize an international sym posium on aptitude for interpreting took shape. Interpreting scholars in Europe and the US joined forces to convene a group of leading researchers and educa tors specializing in the study of aptitude testing for interpreter education. The in ternational symposium, “Aptitude for Interpreting: Towards Reliable Admission Testing,” was held on May 28–29, 2008, at Lessius University College in Antwerp, Belgium, now part of the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts. Based on a thorough screen ing process, the organizers — Heidi Salaets and Šárka Timarová of Lessius/KU Leuven, and Sherry Shaw of the University of North Florida — put together a pro gram consisting of ten presentations, all of them centering on the enigmatic con nection between means of evaluating aptitude(s) at the entry phase and students’ prospects of success in ultimately joining the ranks of the interpreting profession. One of the admirable attributes of the event was its success in bringing together leading scholars from the signed-language interpreting community as well as their spoken-language counterparts. Seven of the papers presented at Antwerp were made available as a Special Issue of Interpreting (13:1, 2011), co-edited by the late and greatly missed Miriam Shlesinger. Two of the scholars present at the Antwerp Symposium went on to publish further research on aptitude in Interpreting (16:1, 2014). These papers complement those in the Special Issue and are offered in the present volume to gether with the set of seven papers published three years earlier. One can safely claim that the contributions brought together here represent the cutting edge of research into aptitude for interpreting, and the community of interpreting scholars and educators owes a debt of gratitude to the organizers of the landmark symposium in Antwerp. At the same time, the work collected in this volume points to the need for much further research, as, in many ways, the paucity of conclusive findings appears to persist. Those interested in the state of the art in the field of aptitude testing will appre ciate the highly productive integration of work done by interpreter educators, on the one hand, and insights gleaned from other disciplines, chief among them ex perimental psychology, on the other. Moreover, as reflected by the chapters in this volume, the role of personality traits in the composite profile of a likely candidate has gained prominence alongside the traditional focus on cognitive skills. No less important, the reader will come to see the many similarities (and few differences) between aptitude testing in the fields of spoken- and signed-language interpreting. The volume opens with a sweeping chronological overview of the field, in cluding a survey of those characteristics that a prospective interpreter is expected to possess and the means of measuring them, by Mariachiara Russo. Delivered as the keynote address at the Antwerp Symposium, the paper draws attention to the rather consistent perception of the ideal interpreter profile over the years and offers a succinct review of test designs that allow for the identification of statisti cally significant predictors of examination results and program completion rates. One point that emerges from this comprehensive presentation of the state of the art is the neglect in most entrance examinations of applicants’ ‘soft skills’ such as motivation and other personality traits. These are effectively explored in some of the following chapters. In a study which grew out of an ambitious project investigating both cogni tive abilities and soft skills, Šárka Timarová and Heidi Salaets use a learning style inventory, a test of motivation and a cognitive flexibility task to explore the charac teristics of undergraduate students who decide to enrol in an interpreter training program. The authors also investigate the relationship between students’ success ful completion of training, on the one hand, and their scores on each of these, on the other. They find that students who self-select for interpreting tend to show higher cognitive flexibility and achievement motivation and to be less susceptible to debilitating anxiety.
