Interpreting Pedagogy, Difficulties, Technologies, and Skill Correlates in the Saudi Context: A Systematic Self-Review (2000–2022)

Abstract

This study conducted a systematic review (SR) of the author’s interpreting research published between 2000 and 2022, with the aim of identifying the thematic areas, methodological orientations, and pedagogical or theoretical contributions that characterize this long term research program. The corpus consists of fifteen studies grouped into four thematic clusters: curriculum design and pedagogical approaches, technology in interpreting training, interpreting difficulties and performance problems, and correlates of interpreting skills. Taken together, these studies present a coherent picture of interpreting as a complex, teachable, and strongly language  and knowledge dependent skill. Across clusters, the findings consistently show that structured, fully oral, and gradual training models enable beginners with no prior experience to perform liaison interpreting tasks with increasing fluency and accuracy. At the same time, research on difficulties, error patterns, and performance correlates demonstrates that interpreting competence is constrained primarily by students’ L1 and L2 lexical repertoire, background knowledge, and oral language skills rather than by “technique” alone. Directionality studies further reveal that English–Arabic and Arabic–English interpreting are related but asymmetrical in difficulty, with Arabic-English emerging as more demanding, particularly at higher proficiency levels. Overall, the corpus indicates that effective interpreting instruction must integrate graded oral practice, domain and world knowledge building, and systematic development of listening, speaking, and lexical competence in both languages. This SR fills a critical pedagogical gap, as most existing reviews focus on highly specialized professional domains—medical interpreting, conference interpreting, European language pairs, or cognitive processing models—while overlooking undergraduate institutional pedagogy. In contrast, the present review centers on liaison interpreting in Arabic–English educational settings, with sustained attention to undergraduate training in a Saudi institutional environment. It offers a deep, coherent, and longitudinal account of a single research program that has systematically examined curriculum design, technology integration, error patterns, and competence correlates over more than two decades. As such, it complements global SRs by contributing a pedagogically grounded, context specific, and language pair sensitive perspective, highlighting underrepresented issues such as proper noun pronunciation in Arabic–English and English-Arabic media discourse and the role of world knowledge in EFL interpreters’ performance.