In the longitudinal study, at the end of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th semesters, students were invited to consecutively interpret source language texts of comparable length and complexity, from English into Hungarian. The topic of the SL texts was an introduction to a British or American university or a college, with the aim of recruiting future students to these institutions.

 

 

In addition to consecutive interpreting, recordings were made of the spontaneous and extemporaneous speech production of the students in the session after the second semester of their studies. Spontaneous speech production was recorded as part of an interview with the students about everyday topics related to their background in languages and problems encountered during interpreting. The topic of the extemporaneous speech production task was the advantages and disadvantages of being a student at an American university or college. This topic was selected so that students got better prepared for the end of the second semester CI topic, which was the introduction of an American college with the aim of recruiting students to this college.

 

 

The consecutively interpreted target language texts were analysed for fidelity, the strategies used by the interpreter trainees, the frequency of occurrence of disfluencies, the use of grammatical cohesive devices, and the use of explicitation shifts. In addition, the retrospective comments of the interpreter trainees, and the evaluations of the Hungarian target language texts by interpreter trainers and members of a target audience are also presented. The methodology of these investigations is detailed in the respective chapter.