Populating a 3D virtual learning environment for interpreting students with bilingual dialogues to support situated learning in an institutional context

Abstract

The point of departure of this article is an immersive (avatar-based) 3D virtual environment which was developed in the European project IVY – Interpreting in Virtual Reality – to simulate interpreting practice. Whilst this environment is the first 3D environment dedicated to interpreter-mediated communication, research in other educational contexts suggests that such environments can foster learning. The IVY 3D environment offers a range of virtual ‘locations’ (e.g. business meeting room, tourist office, doctor’s surgery) which serve as backdrops for the practice of consecutive and dialogue interpreting in business and public service contexts. The locations are populated with relevant objects and with robot-avatars who act as speakers by presenting recorded monologues and bilingual dialogues. Students, represented by their own avatars, join them to practise interpreting. This article focuses on the development of the bilingual dialogues, which are at the heart of many interpreter-mediated business and public service encounters but which are notoriously difficult to obtain for educational purposes. Given that interpreter training institutions usually need to offer bilingual resources of comparable difficulty levels in many language combinations, ad hoc approaches to the creation of such materials are normally ruled out. The approach outlined here was therefore to start from available corpora of spoken language that were designed with pedagogical applications in mind. The article begins by explaining how the dialogues were created and then discusses the benefits and potential shortcomings of this approach in the context of interpreter education. The main points of discussion concern (1) the level of systematicity and authenticity that can be achieved with this corpus-based approach; and (2) the potential of a 3D virtual environment to increase this sense of authenticity and thus to enable students to experience the essence of dialogue interpreting in a simulated environment.

Keywords:

• dialogue interpreting
• virtual environment
• authenticity
• corpus-based approach
• dialogue creation

Notes

1. EU Lifelong Learning Programme project 511862-LLP-1-2010-1-UK-KA3-KA3MP; co-ordinator: University of Surrey, UK (www.virtual-interpreting.net); with financial support from the European Commission.

2. See, for example, the EU-funded projects IMPLI and Building Mutual Trust 2, both focusing on legal interpreting.

3. English Language Interview Corpus as a Second-Language Application. The development of the ELISA corpus was supported by a young researcher grant (S. Braun), University of Tübingen 2003–04; http://www.corpora4learning.net/elisa); see Braun (2006, 2010).

4. BACKBONE (European Lifelong Learning Programme project 143502-LLP-1-2008-1-DE-KA2-KA2MP, 2009–10; co-ordinator: University of Tübingen, Germany; www.uni-tuebingen.de/backbone); with financial support from the European Commission; see Kohn (2012).

5. Note that ‘question’ turns were not necessarily questions, but could also be comments made by the speaker.

6. Second Life was developed by Linden Research Inc® and launched in 2003 (www.secondlife.com). It had 30 million registered users in July 2012 (http://www.gridsurvey.com).

7. The EVIVA (Evaluating the education of interpreters and their clients through virtual learning activities) project is currently conducting an evaluation of several virtual learning environments – including 3D and videoconference-based environments – to analyse their affordances for supporting interpreting students in working with ready-made bilingual content and in conducting live role plays.