10/06/2026
If you're planning to become a certified court interpreter, you've probably wondered what the exam actually measures — and whether the skills it tests are the skills that matter. This colloquium shares results from a 15-year study of over 5,900 U.S. court interpreter certification candidates, examining which interpreting mode — simultaneous, consecutive, or sight translation — best predicts overall exam success. The answer may surprise you: the mode most candidates find easiest to prepare for turns out to be the weakest predictor of overall competence. We'll unpack what this means for how you might approach exam prep, and what it suggests about where certification testing is headed as more jurisdictions face interpreter shortages.
Join the Program in Translation and Interpreting Studies at Illinois 📅Oct 14 at ⏰11AM CT
Melissa Wallace (she / her / ella) received her PhD in translation and interpreting studies (TIS) from the Universidad de Alicante, Spain. She is a Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she directs the graduate certificate program in TIS. A certified court interpreter and certified healthcare interpreter, she is currently the presiding official of the Licensed Court Interpreter Advisory Board of the Judicial Branch Certification Commission for the Supreme Court of Texas. She was an active member of the Home for Trainers Webinars Work Group at the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC) from its inception until 2019, a work group that to date has produced over 75 high-quality train-the-trainer webinars led by leaders in the field of community interpreting. Until 2026, Wallace served as the president of the board of the Society for the Study of Translation and Interpretation (SSTI), the non-profit educational and research foundation of the National Association of Judicial Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT). In 2016, she carried out research on court interpreting certification models in Finland as the Fulbright-University of Tampere Scholar. In 2024 she was appointed to the International Community Translation Research Group, a team of international and interdisciplinary scholars dedicated to producing and disseminating quality research that informs training, policymaking, and professional practice. She has published widely in legal-inflected top tier journals in the field of translation studies, including five co-edited books and special issues.
