Consecutive interpreting entails a large number of almost concurrent cognitive, psychomotor and affective processes, all of which pose major challenges for the interpreter who has to deal with them simultaneously. The interpreter is constantly confronted with unexpected situations that must be dealt with while he/she is already working at the limits of his/her available processing capacity (Gile 1995). It is therefore crucial that interpreter training should be as effective as possible and that during their training period, future professional interpreters should develop a series of strategies or tactics that can be used to solve the problems encountered. Gile (1995; 2009) describes a series of tactics and strategies interpreters apply when problems in the interpreting process arise. He establishes a distinction between the terms tactics and strategies. According to this author, strategies are planned actions with specific objectives and tactics refer to online decisions and actions taken by the interpreter during the execution of the task to overcome the difficulties encountered. He restricts the use of these two terms to deliberate decisions and actions aimed at preventing or solving problems. In the present study, we prefer to use the term strategy to refer to both immediate and longer-term actions taken to solve a problem. At the same time, as we shall see in the results of the study, and bearing in mind that our analysis is based on a retrospective reflection by the students after having completed a task, it is impossible to determine whether the strategies adopted by the students when faced with an interpreting problem are conscious and deliberate, or whether they are unconscious, spontaneous actions and reactions in response to a difficulty.

Interpreting quality depends on certain skills and strategies that need to be acquired over time, usually as part of a university training programme. One issue that is central to the question of what makes a good interpreter, and is closely related to the interpreter training, is the question of how the interpreting output of experts and novices differs, both in terms of quality and processing (Sunnari 2003). In this sense, a number of studies have been carried out in the field of teaching interpreting which define how the evolution from novice to expert interpreter takes place. Hoffman (1997) and Moser-Mercer, Frauenfelder et al. (2000) stress that the development of expertise happens in different phases, as students progress from a cognitive stage, through an associative stage to an autonomous stage. In translation and interpreting novices still need to engage in tactical learning whereby they learn specific rules for solving specific problems. This tactical knowledge then becomes increasingly well organised and the novice develops a set of strategies designed to optimally solve the problems he/she encounters (Moser-Mercer, Frauenfelder et al. 2000: 110). It is worth noting the prominent position that strategic competence has come to occupy in recent thinking about the acquisition of interpreting expertise and the fact that some authors (Ericsson 2001; Moser-Mercer, Frauenfelder et al. 2000) point to strategic ability as an indication of expert knowledge in interpreting. According to Moser-Mercer (1997: 194), research on the interpreting process needs to go further, addressing not only the knowledge structures, but, more particularly, the dynamic nature of their application during the interpreting process.

However, following Hurtado (2001: 276), despite their fundamental importance concerning the key role of operative knowledge in translation and interpreting, studies which examine translation and interpreting strategies are still in their infancy. Gile (2000: 81) similarly stresses that there are very few studies that describe strategic processes in interpreting.

This study aims to identify some general patterns in the emergence of problems and strategies reported by students at two different stages of training in consecutive interpreting. Furthermore, it analyses the students’ perceptions concerning their ability to resolve interpreting problems. Finally, the study evaluates whether the questionnaire used is a suitable method for studying the strategic component in interpreting.

The results presented are descriptive and were obtained from the analysis of a post-interpreting questionnaire answered by the students. It is, therefore, a pilot study whose purpose is to approach the subject on the basis of the information provided by the individual students who participated in the study. It should be pointed out that the questionnaire was not specifically designed for the purpose of the research, but was previously used by the researcher (who is also a teacher of interpreting) as a didactic instrument in the interpreting classroom. It was as a result of observing how students were prompted by the questions in the questionnaire to reflect in detail on the problems they had encountered in their interpreting tasks and how they had solved them that we decided to undertake the present study to monitor the observable patterns in the data obtained. We study the problems reported by two groups of interpreting students (beginners and advanced) when carrying out an exercise in consecutive interpreting. We also set out to identify the strategies reported by the two groups of students in solving the problems detected. Another objective of the study is to observe the usefulness of the post-interpreting questionnaire in research on this topic.

As stated by Riccardi, “conference interpreting is no longer merely considered an implicit competence, a skill difficult to explain and put into words and whose teaching is even more difficult, if not impossible” (Riccardi 2005: 757). It is also a form of declarative knowledge, rising into consciousness, which can therefore be verbalized. Accordingly, if we succeed in understanding how the processes involved in the exercise of interpreting are acquired and developed, we shall be able to lay the foundations for designing training parameters which take strategic competence into account.

The concept of strategy was first introduced in the field of translation by Hönig and Kussmaul (1982), who defined translation strategies as processes which lead to an optimum solution to a translation problem. Hurtado (1999: 246) defines translation strategies as the individual procedures, both conscious and unconscious, verbal and non-verbal, used by the translator to solve the problems encountered in the course of the translation process, depending on the specific requirements involved.

Regarding the problems, according to Nord (1988: 151), these are objective difficulties that all translators need to resolve during a given task, regardless of their level of competence and formal working conditions. Riccardi (1998) states that simultaneous interpreting can be considered a problem-solving activity. The difficulty arises from the original speech, while the solution occurs in the interpreted speech, and the strategies consist in the mechanisms and decisions that take place between the problem and its solution.

Returning to the concept of strategy, Hurtado (2001: 277) states that translation strategies may be linguistic, extralinguistic, instrumental or pragmatic. Attempts have been made to analyse translation strategies by means of experiments. The main methodological approach used has been think-aloud protocols, that is, where the translator (or translation student) expresses his/her mental processes while translating. Some noteworthy studies along these lines include those by Lörscher (1991) and Kiraly (1995). In other cases software such as Camtasia and Proxy were used. They allow the translation process to be recorded and to view the steps taken by the translator, namely, corrections, consulting document sources and modifications. On the other hand, the software Translog (Jakobsen 2011), in addition to recording the translation process, also provides time statistics, pauses by the translator, behaviour, etc. Thus it is possible to obtain data in a more natural setting. Finally, not to be forgotten are the eye-tracking systems, which record eye movements of the translator across the screen.

Lörscher (1991: 125) considers a translation strategy to be a conscious and individual process used to solve a translation problem. Therefore, translation strategies are individual; they entail an element of planning, pursue certain objectives and are associated with a series of actions taken in the pursuit of achieving those objectives. He organizes strategies into three global strategies:

• propose preliminary solutions to problems (explore);

• literally repeat source or target text segments that have already been captured or verbalised (control);

• recoup segments and reformulate them (paraphrase).

He also underlines the wide variety of strategies used. In other words, different strategies are used by different subjects to deal with the same problem. However, he only considers translation problems of a lexical, syntactic or lexico-syntactic nature.

The study by Kiraly (1995) presents a series of translation process indicators, including dictionary query strategies, the use of mnemonic devices, retranslations, etc. However, there are drawbacks to both Lörscher (1991) and Kiraly’s (1995) studies regarding their general assertions about translation strategies. Lörscher’s study focuses on foreign language students and consequently deals with pedagogical translation rather than professional translation, extrapolating from students engaged in pedagogical translations to professionals who carry out communicative translation. Kiraly studies a group of nine translators and nine translation students, which is a rather small sample.

As shown by the studies reviewed, analysing the strategic component in interpreting is considered to be a fundamental source of relevant data for teaching. Abuín (2007) provides an exhaustive review of the most prominent strategy-related studies in the field of interpreting, which we shall now briefly consider.

Gile (2002; 2009) analyses interpreting problems and strategies through his Effort Model.[1] In this Model, Gile talks about processing capacity, which is finite and which enables us to see the errors in the interpretation process and propose solutions to these difficulties. Kalina (1998; 2000) has also made noteworthy contributions with her notions of strategy, strategic processing and interpreting competence. Kohn and Kalina (1996: 126) point out that interpreting can be explained from its strategic dimension, in the sense that it constitutes a speech that is strategically processed and produced with the objective of facilitating the interlinguistic transfer of mental models which have been created on the basis of a source and target speech. Kalina uses the term strategy in the broad sense to refer to the text processing and production operations performed by the interpreter during the reception and/or production of a speech. Kalina (1994; 2000; 2002) also makes a methodological contribution to the gathering and analysis of empirical data on the interpreting process. Thus, in her study published in 1994, Kalina provides practical and general information on gathering an audio interpreting corpus and concludes that, given the diversity of the existing criteria for transcribing oral material, in the case of an interpreting corpus the selection criteria should be the most appropriate to the proposed object of study. It is particularly important to use the introspective methodological tool of the think-aloud protocol, which allows a subject’s comments while performing a specialized task to be monitored. Kalina adapts this method of introspective verbalisation to the specific circumstances of interpreting, transforming it into a retrospective tool applied at the end of the process to obtain verbal data from interpreters about the difficulties encountered and the strategies used during the interpreting task. Similarly, Riccardi (1996) studies the difficulties encountered and the solutions brought to bear by interpreters with differing degrees of experience as they tackle a simultaneous interpreting task. From a more theoretical point of view, Riccardi (1998) has reflected on the creative component in interpreting strategies. In her study published in 1999, Riccardi emphasises that there are general strategies, which are applicable to all language combinations, and specific strategies applicable to the individual language pairs in question. Riccardi (2005) distinguishes between comprehension, production, overall and emergency strategies. Comprehension strategies generally include anticipation, segmentation, selection of information, stalling or waiting, while production strategies consist of compression, expansion, approximation strategies, generalisation, use of linguistic open-end forms, morphosyntactic transformation and the use of prosodic elements, such as pauses and intonation. Décalage and monitoring are counted among overall strategies, while emergency strategies may include, for example, the omission of text segments, transcoding and parallel reformulation.

Ivanova (2000) makes a methodological contribution to the study of strategic competence in interpreting by examining the limitations and the possibilities involved in using retrospective, or post-task, verbalisation instruments in process-based studies. She explores the use of retrospective protocols for investigating the cognitive processes mediating performance during simultaneous interpreting. She showed that applying the methodology of delayed retrospection to SI requires careful design and manipulation of different types of memory support for retrospection. Instructing the subjects to verbalise segment by segment and giving them the opportunity to initiate the retrospection can elicit interesting data.

Other important studies include those by Sunnari (1995; 2003), which present the results of using macro-processing or synthesis strategies in simultaneous interpreting. It is the author’s hypothesis that macro-processing is one of the key strategies leading to a fluent simultaneous interpretation. She states that an ability to apply macro-strategies (synthesis, summarising, elimination of redundant or superfluous information) not only qualifies the task of the interpreter, but also determines the quality of the interpretation.

Gran (1998) presents the results of an empirical study on reformulation strategies used by professional interpreters and interpreting students. In her application of the results to training, the author advocates a gradual approach to the acquisition of simultaneous interpreting skills beginning with exercises training one skill at a time, such as text analysis, abstracting, paraphrasing, and subsequently moving over to the whole task. At a later stage, training will be devoted to particularly difficult or complex parts of the interpreting process – the speaker’s pronunciation, speed of delivery, density of information, specialized terminology, rhetoric.

Another particularly helpful study is that of Abuín (2007), which offers an in-depth analysis of the various approaches to studying the problem-strategy relationship. Moreover, the study presents a classification of the corresponding problems and strategies, both during the reception of the message in the original language and the production of the message in the target language.

The results were analysed from the perspective of the objectives proposed at the outset, that is, first the interpreting problems the students detected during the activity, followed by an analysis of the strategies they reported after performing the interpreting exercise.

The descriptive study presented here allows the identification and classification of some of the problems and strategies found in consecutive interpreting at two different stages in interpreter training.

During the task, the novice students reported more problems than the advanced students, especially in the phases corresponding to understanding the original speech and taking down and decoding their notes. It is important to emphasise that the problems that crop up in each group tend to be different in kind. More technique-related problems emerge for the novice group, particularly when taking and decoding notes, and the same is true of more individual factors associated with feeling nervous or lacking confidence. Yet, it is surprising to find that both lack of attention and concentration problems related to memory during the note-deciphering stage only affected the advanced students. It is likely that the novice students, who have just begun to practise note-taking, are far too busy dealing with note-taking techniques to bear in mind that, along with their notes, memory, attention and concentration are also important skills when practising consecutive interpreting. It is possible that beginners mistake problems of lack of attention and concentration, which are truly at the root of their difficulties, for technical problems because, at that stage of training, they believe that the key lies in techniques, whereas as they advance, they realize that this is not the case. Nevertheless, it would be necessary to work with a larger sample size, as well as to consider other variables, in order to carry out a study with more statistical impact.

Regarding the students’ perceptions concerning their ability to solve interpreting problems, the novice students report a greater ability to solve problems related to understanding the original speech. The advanced students show a greater perception of not having satisfactorily solved the task, both in problems related to numbers and those caused by the speed of delivery of the original speech. In the note-taking phase, the novice students express a greater perception of having satisfactorily solved the difficulty arising from the speed of delivery of the original speech. As for detecting a lack of connectors, whereas the advanced students express no degree of resolution, half of the novice students state that they have partially solved the problem. Regarding a lack of clarity in their notes, once again it is the novice students who report having failed to solve the problems stemming from this difficulty. Similarly, the degree of partial resolution expressed by the advanced students is greater than that reported by the novice students. One possible explanation for this general tendency of the advanced students to express less satisfaction with solving the problems may have to do with the fact that the more advanced the students are in the training process, the more critical they are of their performance. Their higher level of training is not necessarily reflected by a greater degree of confidence in their performance. In this context, we recall the contributions of Ericsson (2001) and Moser-Mercer, Frauenfelder et al (2000), previously mentioned, observing that the process whereby interpreter trainees progress to incipient expertise involves raising their strategic awareness, their capacity to reflect on the process and their critical awareness. Gile (2009) also advocates an explicit analysis of the strategic component, as opposed to approaches in which strategy acquisition is mainly a “trial-and-error” procedure, involving little or no analysis of processing capacity management.

Regarding strategies, the novice students tend to report a greater use of strategies than the advanced students, probably because students in the novice group also detect a larger number of problems. And perhaps because more advanced students have mastered and internalized a number of strategies to a sufficient extent that they are not aware of using them.

However, the advanced students have recourse to a wider range of strategies than the novice students. Sometimes both groups use the same strategy to solve the same kind of problem, and certain recurring patterns in the relationship between problems and strategies can be observed, as well as some remarkable differences. One noteworthy feature is that the novice group, who have received fewer hours of training, resort to adding wrong information, perhaps because the students are reluctant to leave a gap in their interpretation. They normally add information that they guess to be true or which, although not conveyed by the speaker’s utterance, may be true. In the case of the advanced group, who have almost finished their training in consecutive interpreting, there is much more use of omissions, which is generally taken to be a less clumsy strategy than adding wrong information, but requires a certain amount of practice and decision-making to be able to use it effectively. The advanced students also resort more often to summarising and paraphrasing, which also require more practice and greater mastery of discourse analysis.

There are some commonalities among all the students when tackling certain problems. The recurrences found between both groups coincide with Gile (2009), who states that interpreters do not choose tactics or strategies at random. The author observes that the behaviour of trainees, as well as professional interpreters, follows certain “laws” or trends, which are sometimes conscious, but often unconscious. The recurrences that we have found in the corpus studied are as follows: when faced with the problem of a lack of understanding, a similar reaction can be seen across both groups when it comes to using omission, common sense and even summarising strategies. Faced with the problem of a source text delivered at an excessively fast speed, omission and summarising account for high percentages in both groups, but they then differ in their use of other strategies. When unclear notes are the source of the problem, there is a great deal of variability, but both groups coincide when it comes to the tendency to resort to memory and common sense. If there are sound problems, all the students concur over the action, deliberate or not, of paying greater attention. In cases where they do not manage to note down numbers, students from both groups tend to generalise when interpreting. When they detect the absence of connectors in their notes, both groups resort to using common sense. Regarding strategies used only by the advanced students, these are found mainly when it comes to reformulating in the target language. They are: summarizing, omitting, applying common sense and paying more attention.

This study shows a number of trends in the strategic actions taken by the students, depending on the level of training. Summarising the main results:

• Novice students report more problems than the advanced students;

• The problems that crop up tend to be different in kind, depending on the level of training;

• Regarding the students’ perceptions concerning their ability to solve interpreting problems, advanced students show a greater sense of failure to satisfactorily resolve the task;

• There are some commonalities among all the students when tackling certain problems;

• Novice students tend to report a greater use of strategies than the advanced students;

• Advanced students draw on a wider range of strategies.

These results merit consideration in further studies, as we may hypothesise that a greater understanding of the problem-strategy relationship at different levels of interpreter training could have a direct impact on the development of methods and materials contributing to improvements in the teaching of consecutive interpreting.

Likewise, the fact that advanced students have a wider range of strategies at their disposal, which allow them to deal with a greater number of problems compared to novice students, suggests the importance of integrating into the firsts stages of the interpreting training the practice of identifying and consciously reflecting on interpreting problems, as well as investigating their causes. This practice can be expressly introduced by the teacher during training with a view to providing the students with resources which will enable them to self-regulate their interpreting performance and raise their awareness of the most challenging aspects of the process.

Furthermore, some results, such as the spontaneous use of particular strategies, indicate that special attention should be given to certain strategies in the classroom and to the corresponding teaching considerations, given their likely positive or negative repercussions on the training process.

Useful data can be elicited by encouraging the students to verbalise their strategies, thus giving them the opportunity to initiate the retrospection. In particular, it is a good way for the teacher to obtain first-hand information about the students’ concerns and their main problems.

The study also allows us to pinpoint the adjustments necessary in future research. The pilot test verifies the overall appropriateness of the questionnaire in collecting data on the problem-strategy relationship. The instrument is simple to administer, and the data obtained can easily be processed and extracted for subsequent statistical analysis. One of the questions raised when the study was designed concerned the feasibility of retrospection. The study shows that relevant information was indeed remembered, although the subjects varied in the length and informativeness of their verbalisations. However, the study also reveals that the use of the questionnaire has certain limitations. We cannot totally be sure of how much information was missed. Repeating this kind of study in various, controlled, circumstances will help to circumvent this limitation. Moreover, there is usually an important degree of inaccuracy when questions about the processes involved are answered retrospectively. We had to discard a high percentage of incompletely answered questionnaires (11 out of 26). It should also be remembered that the questionnaire is static in nature; in other words, students are only able to answer the questions formulated by the questionnaire, whereas some other type of data-collection tool, such as interviews, focus groups or think aloud protocols, might possibly lead to other important information on the process followed.

Finally, we would like to stress that the results obtained in this study mark only the beginning of a more in-depth research project on the problem-strategy relationship. This will require an analysis of the internal consistency of the questionnaire used, as well as the inclusion of new variables in order to enlarge the available corpus. So it would be possible to analyse both the verbalisations of the subjects concerning the process itself (through interviews and questionnaires), and the objective documents resulting from the consecutive interpreting task (the recording of the students’ interpreting performances and their interpreting notes). Similarly, with a view to achieving a larger sample size, future studies could incorporate a larger number of teaching centres throughout Spain, thereby increasing the sample and taking into account certain variables which may influence the results, such as the teaching methodology used at each institution and the academic and language background of the subjects.

In summary, future studies in the field of the problem-strategy relationship in consecutive interpreting will contribute to gain a better insight into how the processes involved in interpreting are acquired and developed, with a view not only to enhancing the teaching of the discipline, but also to providing advanced professional interpreters with the means to continue to improve the quality of their work.