Preparatory Exercises for Simultaneous Interpreting: Preliminary Results of a Didactic Experiment

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a didactic experiment in which Spanish–Italian students of the MA in Interpreting (University of Bologna) tested “Preparatory Exercises for Simultaneous Interpreting” (SI), the third unit of an online, asynchronous course for self- and collaborative learning hosted on a Moodle-based platform. The unit is grounded in a deconstructivist approach, whereby SI is temporarily decomposed into interrelated sub-skills that are practiced separately and then promptly reintegrated into the complex activity, as in an authentic working situation. Through a graduated sequence of intralingual and interlingual activities—shadowing with synonyms and reformulation, décalage adjustment, multitasking with concurrent sensory stimuli, sight translation, and the ‘cleaning’ of disfluencies and redundancies— the unit targets simultaneous listening and production, décalage management, lexical availability, and the integration of auditory and visual inputs. Adopting a mixed-methods design, the study triangulates ordinal-scale and open-ended self-assessment worksheets with anonymous questionnaires. While 46 students completed the unit, the analysis isolates the Spanish–Italian student cohort, allowing a granular qualitative reading of cognate-language difficulties such as calques and lexical ambiguities. Results indicate high overall satisfaction and very positive ratings for the platform’s technical, organizational, and interactive features; self-assessments identify décalage adjustment and disfluency ‘cleaning’ as areas of perceived improvement, while the management of multiple sensory inputs emerges as the sub-skill most in need of targeted practice—an increasingly critical competence in remote, hybrid, and AI-augmented interpreting. Although piloted on the Spanish–Italian pair, the pedagogical framework is conceived as language-independent.

Keywords

• simultaneous interpreting
• interpreter training
• online learning
• preparatory exercises
• self-assessment

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