Development of professional identity

Project summary

In our presentation, we will focus on interpreters’ professional identity. Professional identity involves the execution of a professional role and includes the characteristics, knowledge, values, skills, beliefs, and ethical guidelines that constitute the professional “self” (Heggen, 2008). The interpreter’s professional identity has been studied from various perspectives (e.g., Burn, 2019; Suslova, 2018; Urdal, 2019), mostly in relation to students attending undergraduate educational programs. We will present some preliminary results from an ongoing study of how our one-year, part-time training course influences the professional identity of public service interpreters of spoken languages in Norway.

Since 2020, the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, in collaboration with the University of Bergen, has been imparting a thirty-ECTS course in public service interpretation (PSI), financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. The course aims to give a basic introduction to PSI and thus contribute to remedying the fact that in Norway, between forty and fifty percent of PSI is carried out by persons with no formal training. Each year we offer the course in four languages to a total of thirty students. The course is organized as a part-time distance learning course with students from all over Norway. Each semester, the students have three campus meetings in Bergen (for two days), while the rest of the classes are organized online. Around ninety percent of the students have between one and twenty years of experience as interpreters, but no formal training.

The training course we provide is divided into two modules: one that concentrates on professionalization and ethics and one that emphasizes terminology and contextual knowledge. The first module aims to raise the students’ awareness regarding ethical issues, improve their interpreting skills, and promote a sense of professional identity. In the second module, the students meet representatives of public institutions in Norway, who give lectures related to their field, and work with terminology and role plays.

We are currently conducting a qualitative study with the first two groups of students who attended the training course. By using a survey, we aim to investigate to what extent the course contributes to developing the interpreters’ professional identity. The questions in the survey relate to the students’ work as interpreters after taking the course and explore whether the students are experiencing a change in awareness regarding ethical issues, their knowledge and skills, and their relationship to the participant in the interpreted event. Our presentation will discuss the preliminary results of this study. Our goal is to elaborate on whether and how the students’ professional identity has been influenced by their participation in the training course.