Designing a competence profile to guide crash courses for non-professional interpreters working in the field of international protection

Abstract

In a context of an ever-increasing number of applications for international protection, translation and interpretation play a crucial role in the integration of displaced persons into the host society and in safeguarding their most basic rights. Legislation enshrines the right to translation and interpretation in the field of international protection, but does not establish training or professional requirements for the provision of these services. This leads to the fact that very often those who carry out these interpreting tasks have no prior training or professional qualification in interpreting, which in turn undermines the quality of the service provided and brings clear disadvantages for end-users. This is even more conspicuous in the case of the so-called languages of lesser diffusion or minority languages, for which there are no university training programmes in place but for which there is a very high demand, sometimes as a result of specific humanitarian crises. This paper presents a competence profile which encompasses the fundamental skills, abilities and knowledge that an interpreter working in the field of international protection must have, broken down into competence areas, with the aim that this competence model can, in turn, help to establish learning objectives in the design of crash courses for non-professional interpreters.