ИСТИНА

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 to take advantage of both spoken and sign language interpreting at any time and in any place where broadband Internet connection is available. The financial gain for users seems obvious: they don’t need to incur interpreters’ displacement costs, whilst such platforms allow to reduce interpreters’ paid working time up to some minutes. However, a broad implementation of on-demand VRI-systems encounters some substantial challenges (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 service provided). The quality issue in on-demand VRI could be considered at minimum four levels: technological (quality of output sound and picture), substantive (accuracy in source speech content rendition and communication target accomplishment), linguistic and prosodic (appropriate delivery of a message in a target language), and deontological (confidentiality, sometimes anonymity of consumer, and neutrality of interpreter). Most of these parameters aren’t 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”).