Resumen de tesis. Ethical motivation: testing the impact of values and beliefs in interpreter education

Abstract

[EN] This dissertation explores motivational aspects of interpreter education from the viewpoint of the ethics of care, using a mixed-methods empirical approach. The main hypothesis is that ethical motivation directly influences participants’ perception of the variables: perceived interest, perceived usefulness, and perceived difficulty. As a main objective, this study aims to improve educational practice in interpreting by offering a deeper understanding of how ethical motivation (including values and beliefs) affects perceived difficulty in interpreting exercises in groups of students and volunteers. As secondary objectives, the dissertation analyses results when performing retour interpreting in the language pair Spanish/English, and also examines secondary results with speeches from different settings. Participants are students of interpreting at university, and volunteer interpreters at Social Forums. The dissertation is framed within the perspective of technofeminism and the ethics of care, and it explores ethical values and beliefs in the study of motivational aspects in interpreter education. Ethical motivation, and emancipatory ethical values and beliefs in particular, are studied in the spirit of technofeminism as an ethical approach to freedom of knowledge and research, where emotional and feminist aspects have been historically neglected. Constructing knowledge from a 4E cognition scaffolding brings long-neglected aspects, such as emotions, into interpreter education. Motivation not only belongs in the realm of emotions, it also feeds from other feelings and perceptions the interpreting students may have, largely influencing the way they see their educational process, and themselves. The values and beliefs explored through the framework of the ethics of care are present here not just in the study of motivational constructs and variables but, crucially, in a wider perspective where femininity, embodiment, and ethical choices are at the heart of educational activities and research. The results on ethical motivation, and on retour interpreting provide relevant conclusions, not just pedagogically speaking, but also in ethical and motivational terms. The results are clear and simple: participants did not care whether they were interpreting into A or into B; their perception of interest, usefulness and difficulty varied solely according to the topic or the context of the video (whether from a Social Forum, or an institutional setting). The different groups of participants valued Social Forum videos higher than institutional videos, both in perceived interest and perceived usefulness. The empirical results obtained for ethical motivation are of very high statistical significance. The motivation elicited by videos of Social Forums is sharply higher for every student group tested, and even stronger for the Malmö Social Forum group of ad-hoc volunteer interpreters. In all settings, as ethical motivation increases, perceived difficulty decreases. Thus, ethical motivation directly influences perceptions of interest and usefulness in participants, in a positive manner, as well as perceived difficulty, which decreases as the positive motivational variables increase. Furthermore, retour interpreting is not perceived as more difficult than interpreting into A, which may encourage the inclusion of retour interpreting as an integral part of the curriculum.