Language and Interpreter Assessment

Pacific Interpreters offers two assessments that are designed to evaluate healthcare employee language skills and screen potential interpreters. These assessments meets the standards currently recommended by the National Council on Interpretation in Health Care and are based on the Language Proficiency Scale developed by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), which is the most comprehensive standard used today in the US foreign language teaching community.

• Language Assessment measures the candidate's bilingual capacity
• Language and Interpreter Skills Assessment measures the candidate's bilingual capacity and their competency as a professional interpreter

All testing is done over the phone and scheduled at the convenience of the interpreter or your organization.

• Assessments can be administered in more than 40 languages.
• Testing can usually be scheduled within two or three days of the initial request.
• We send a written report for each test that you can use to qualify interpreters or bilingual staff.

Language Assessment

• Oral Fluency & Expression—ability to construct connected oral discourse in English and target language that effectively communicates a message
• Listening Comprehension—ability to demonstrate literal comprehension of oral messages through appropriate responses and accurate interpretation
• Health Care Vocabulary—knowledge of basic medical terminology needed for normal communicative functioning during routine health care encounters

Format

• Consecutive interpretation of a medical role-playing scenario

Time Allotment

• 20-30 minutes over the telephone

Language and Interpreter Skills Assessment

In addition to evaluated bilingual capacity as outlined above, the candidate's basic interpreting skills are evaluated by using the following criteria:

• Accuracy—ability to provide accurate, meaning-for-meaning first-person interpretation
• Listening and Recall—ability to retain and faithfully reproduce adequate amount of meaning units
• Appropriate Transparent Intervening—ability to request a repeat or a clarification when necessary in order to deliver an accurate interpretation
• Effective Speech Flow Control—ability to coordinate the pace and length of client's utterances with interpreter's short-term memory and language processing capacity

Format

• Consecutive interpretation of a medical role-playing scenario
• Interpreter knowledge questions
• Interpreter ethics questions

Time Allotment

• 30-45 minutes over the telephone