I failed because I got very nervous. Anxiety and performance in interpreter trainees: an empirical study

Abstract

It goes without saying that conference interpreting is a very stressful activity not least because it involves the performance of a series of complex cognitíve and psychomotor operations in public or at least for the public. During the process of interpreting training the high levéis of stress experienced by students when having to speak (interpret) in public can become one of the major obstacles in the early stages. Stress becomes evident through symptoms of anxiety currently defined by psychologists as a normal innate emotional alarm responso to the anticipation of danger or threat. Anxiety emerges very soon during the early training stages even when students 'only' have to make monolingual presentations in front of their peers and teacher in language A or B. Those levéis of anxiety do not decrease easily when monolingual presentations become real consecutive interpretations involving complex cognitive processes of language and cultural transfer.