the impact of practicing sight translation skills on the performance of consecutive interpreting trainees

Sight translation (st) has long been used in conference interpreting training. however, a few studies have identified and tested the efficacy of st on developing consecutive interpreting in an iraqi context. this study investigated the relationship between st and consecutive interpreting among iraqi trainees. further, it explored the relationship between iraqi consecutive interpreting trainees’ performance in sight translation and their overall consecutive interpreting performance. as such, a purposive or non-probability sampling method was selected. the participants in the study comprised 20 consecutive interpreting trainees from iraq, studying english translation at al hadba university college in iraq. the materials for this study consisted of two english texts, one for the sight translation task and the other for the consecutive interpreting task. both texts were authentic. the english text for sight translation contained 300 words. for the consecutive interpreting an approximately 10-minute audiovisual task with the delivery rate at a maximum speed of 180 words per minute was selected. both tasks were to be translated into arabic. to analyze the data, pearson correlation and regression were run. the results showed that iraqi consecutive interpreting trainees’ performance of sight translation had a significantly positive relationship with their overall consecutive interpreting performance. the findings also revealed that iraqi consecutive interpreting trainees’ performance of sight translation meaningfully predicted their overall consecutive interpreting performance.