Abstract:
This research seeks to build upon the issue of recruiter's expectation toward interpreters, which is the realm less explored. As evident in previous research, criteria and expectations towards interpreters deviate among different stakeholders and user groups with different backgrounds. Though the major findings remained quite similar when it comes to the main criteria, the level of expectations is largely less among users of interpreting services, when compared to the interpreters. Thus, one can expect that recruiters are likely to anticipate differently than other stakeholders. This study is designed to understand the underlying rationality of interpreter recruiters in their choice of interpreters. With such objective, this work explores the criteria and elements influential to individual recruiters in their decision-making, using twelve frequent users of interpreting service from different sectors in a German international organisation in Thailand as a case. The result reveals seven key criteria substantial to the recruiters' selection of interpreters, namely (1) Logical Coherence of Utterance (comprehensibility), (2) Sense of Consistency with the Original (Faithfulness to the original), (3) Fluency of Delivery, (4) Thorough Preparation, (5) Trustworthiness, Reliability, and Accountability, (6) Cost Efficiency, and (7) Punctuality. The findings, hence, confirm the hypothesis that the recruiter's expectation deviates from other stakeholders, but at the same time reiterate the significance of the pre-existing key criteria identified by previous literature.
