Hi, I’m Marisa. I’m a graduate student in Interpreting Studies at Western Oregon University, a Certified Healthcare Interpreter (CHI-Spanish), a CCHI Commissioner, and I’ve been a practicing healthcare interpreter since 2006. Through my work with Tica Interpreter Training and Translations (Tica TnT), I train medical interpreters across the country. This blog is where I process what I’m learning in grad school, reflect on nearly two decades of experience, and share insights that I hope will support the field. I’m using this space to educate myself—and bring what I learn back to the interpreters and LEP patients we serve every day.

Assessing the Assessor: The Importance of Training the Trainer

October 13, 2025
Written by Marisa Rueda Will, CHI-Spanish

Assessing interpreters’ skills as an educator is no easy task. Thanks to Dean and Pollard’s (2013) contributions, interpreting is becoming widely recognized as a practice profession. An important distinction that sheds light on the intricacies of the work, given that “all practice professionals must learn to figure out what to do, given the particular array of demands in each unique situation, since no two situations will be exactly the same” (Dean & Pollard, 2013, p. 75). A stark contrast from mere input/output devices.

Furthermore, what makes assessment even more important is that “once interpreters have finished their training, they will probably be quite isolated throughout their professional lives” (Fowler, 2007, p. 254). Meaning, “peer and self-assessment in interpreter training should foster good professional habits in the interpreter” (Fowler, 2007, p. 255). However, many interpreter educators have not studied assessment academically and rely on their personal experience to direct their teaching and evaluation techniques.

Even those who have studied instruction and assessment techniques, like me, may identify with Wiggins and McTighe (2005) who share that “to think like an assessor prior to designing lessons does not come naturally or easily to many teachers” (p. 150). While creating engaging activities is more enjoyable, learning to assess interpreters with a high reliability scoring “requires carefully and unambiguously defined rubrics and extensive, careful training of scorers” (National Research Council, 2002, p. 43). In other words, just like learning interpreting skills requires practice, so does becoming a skilled interpreter skills assessor.

In addition to creating reliable assessment rubrics, educators need to develop processes to foster assessor-skill acquisition among their learners. According to Fowler (2007), “trainees must have a basic understanding of the interpreting process before they begin to practice peer assessment in class [and they] need to be briefed about how to receive and give oral and written feedback to their peers” (p. 255-256). To reach this stage, interpreter educators must foster trust among their learners and devise a plan to learn feedback skills before putting them into a situation where they will be asked to evaluate their peer’s work.

As educators who are passionate about teaching their students the building blocks of interpreting, first they need to hone their own communication skills within the classroom to develop and disseminate clear expectations and guidelines that take away the element of surprise in grading and give them ownership over their learning.

References

Dean, R. K., & Pollard, R. Q. Jr. (2013). The demand control schema: Interpreting as a practice profession. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Fowler, Y. (2007). Formative assessment: Using peer and self-assessment in interpreter training. In C. Wadensjö, D. B. Englund, & A. Nilsson (Eds.), Critical Link 4: Professionalisation of interpreting in the community (pp. 253–262). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

National Research Council. (2002). Performance assessments for adult education: Exploring the measurement issues—Report of a workshop. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10366

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.