Quality assurance in international sign conference interpreting at international organisations
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Quality assurance(QA)in conference interpreting is considered essential among international organisations and interpreting practitioners (Pöchhacker, 1994). The need for QA resulted in the establishment of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) and the development of university degree programmesin conference interpreting in spoken languages worldwide(Seeber, 2021). International organisationssuch as the United Nations and the European Union (EU)work closely with universities worldwide to ensure that interpreters are trained and assessed in line with their requirements. Sign language conference interpreters working with International Sign (IS) do not have equivalent opportunities to be trained and assessed as their spoken language colleagues, with whom they work forinternational organisations. Therefore, to assure that those who deliver IS conference interpretation services are up to quality standards, the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) and the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters (WASLI) established an accreditation system for IS interpreters in 2015. As of June 2021, thirty IS interpreters had obtained the corresponding accreditation. In this article we examinethe 2021 QA system forIS conference interpreters and present findings from our 2019 global survey of the perspectives of IS conference interpreters (de Wit et al., 2021)in combination with a follow-up studyon practitioners’training and accreditation needs. The results indicate that there is a demand for formal professional training programmesthat focus on interpreting IS in conference settingsanda need toenhance the current accreditation system.