ИСТИНА

Having emerged in the early 1970’s, remote video-mediated interpreting gave rise to concurring opinions as far as its technical feasibility, reliability and especially quality are concerned. However, this type of ICT-supported interpreting is now gaining more and more ground and often regarded by marketing forecasts as the most promising area of global interpretation market. Since ISDN-based service became available in 1990’s, the video-mediated interpreting has started to be applied sporadically in the videoconferencing domain. Moreover, the last decade revolutionized the interpretation services accessibility by introducing on demand video remote interpreting (VRI) platforms, which enable users equipped with a trivial smartphone (tablet device) to take advantage of both spoken and sign language interpreting at any time and place where a broadband Internet connection is available. Such platforms developing year by year not only technologically but also strategically are likely to extend their usage in traditional on-site interpretation fields: healthcare, business, and tourism. The financial gain for consumers seems obvious, given the fact that they do not need to incur interpreters’ displacement costs, and, to a large extent, for the reason that such platforms allow to reduce interpreters’ paid working time up to some minutes. This contribution reports some results of a comparative survey-based study of two VRI platforms (developed in Austria and Russia) which position themselves as “really on demand” services. It focuses on the collection and analysis of statistical data including the number and situational context of customer requests, main languages involved (in both countries), duration range of interpreting sessions and billing call time, as well as interpreters’ self-assessment and comments regarding the quality attained. The findings reveal that a broad implementation of on demand VRI-systems, however impressive and tempting they seem, encounters some substantial challenges (for instance, prospective users’ unfamiliarity with and unawareness of this type of services, difficulties in recruiting and retention of numerous, even if remote, multilingual interpreting staff available around the clock, and, not least, the quality of services provided). The quality issue in on-demand VRI could be considered at four levels minimum: technological (easiness of connection to the server and quality of output sound and picture), substantive (accuracy in source speech content rendition and communication target accomplishment), linguistic and prosodic (appropriate delivery of the message in the target language), and deontological (confidentiality, sometimes anonymity of consumer, and neutrality of interpreter). Most of these parameters are not actually specific for VRI but the diversity of situations in which users resort to such service would suggest that their hierarchy could vary depending on more or less formal context of interpreter-mediated communication. Yet, in practice, while dealing with quality assurance the providers rely on two factors: first, rather hypothetical, the professional experience of the interpreters employed, second, the most general users’ satisfactory feedback (“like” or “dislike”), which allows to range their interpreting staff in quality categories.