Student Perception of Effective Training for Professional Interpreters and Multitasking at Universities in Vietnam: A Case Study

In Asia English is used as a lingua franca for international, national, and institutional meetings, events and communication. Interpreting from English into LOTE (Languages other than English) and vice versa has become an indispensable tool for successful communication, transaction and project enforcement. As interpreting is defined as the act of orally transferring information from a language into another in an impartial manner, there is a certain set of requirements that clearly distinguish a professional interpreter from a bi/multilingual person who can speak two or more languages. Multitasking, which is the human ability to perform more than one task or activity at the same time, plays a decisive role in training competent interpreters. An interpreter has to apply cross-cultural communicative skills in intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts, develop discourse management skills to handle different communication settings, develop skills and knowledge of key practices. As they are required to perform multiple tasks under time constraints, they must enrich their background knowledge and adopt strategies corresponding to each interpretation mode for the best performance. The findings suggest that multitasking has been perceived by university students—interpreting trainees—in this study as necessary in their current training as well as for future jobs; however, there seem to be some mixed perceptions in terms of the sub-skills needed to be incorporated in performing consecutive and simultaneous interpreting tasks. The study has relevant pedagogical implications for the training of interpreters at the tertiary level in Vietnam, and probably for those in other comparable contexts, which may share similar educational settings, language pairs, and the need for professionalism in the language service sector.