ИСТИНА

Orcit (Online Resources for Conference Interpreter Training) is a multilingual eLearning project launched by four universities partners in 2010 and funded by the European Union. It is presented on a separate site, incorporating six multimedia interactive modules which cover basic subjects and challenges of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting, as well as some guidelines for prospective interpreting research. Welcomed by interpreter training community, ORCIT seem to have gained popularity quickly: over 100,000 page views from over 30,000 users, across nearly 50,000 sessions by 2015. Up to now most surveys, dedicated to ORCIT project, have tended to examine it in terms of its structure, content, best pedagogical and autogogical use and, more recently, from a theoretical point of view. However, the project developers as well as other interpreter training experts claim for empirical tests to evaluate to which extent ORCIT tools have met learners’ and teachers’ needs. This paper presents and discusses some preliminary results of the study that accompanied an attempt to integrate ORCIT into a consecutive interpreting course for undergraduate students within the framework of blended learning approach. Two groups of trainees are compared for this purpose. The first one was introduced ORCIT resources at the very beginning of the one-year course and resorted to these tools on a regular basis during face-to-face and out-of-class sessions. The second followed a more traditional course using some CAIT tools but not ORCIT. The evaluation of interpreting performance of both groups at final examinations were then confronted in a series of statistical tests in order to provide quantitative evidence for comparison. The results, far from being exhaustive, point to a substantial difference in assessed quality of trainees’ performance depending on which their group they belong to.