In September 2006 Romijn Research and Development (RRD) was approached by ECORYS to conduct the end-of project evaluation of the Vietnamese Government Interpreters Training Programme. The evaluation had been assigned to us by the European Commission.
The Vietnamese government Interpreters Training project was adopted by DG AIDCO of the European Commission and the Vietnamese Government to provide the Vietnamese authorities with a body of conference interpreters and conference interpreter training capacity. This provision would have to ensure smooth communication between the Commission (and the international community at large) and (various Departments of) the Vietnamese Government in multi-lingua forums. The ultimate aim of the project was to provide Vietnam with the resources and know-how to establish a fully-fledged European Interpreter Training Centre in Hanoi.
The aim of the evaluation was to review the project’s, relevance, efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability, propose improvements and/or new options for the future and explore possible improvements to the project or other future actions through which the EU might contribute to sustainable results in the performance of the public administration of Vietnam in its negotiations with governments of other countries throughout the world.
RRD (dr. Clemens Romijn) has conducted 9 days of fieldwork in Vietnam - Hanoi in the course of which he visited 18 people -eight representing the EU and Vietnamese ministries/agencies and ten trainees that had followed the programme. In addition to conducting interviews and discussions questionnaires were sent out to persons he was not able to visit during his fieldwork in Hanoi.
The evidence we were able to gather indicated the impact of this project on functioning of the Ministries in negotiations and the position on the labour market of the trainees to be lasting for some time to come. As a result of these findings this evaluation has warmly recommended training of Vietnamese interpreters with the EU training methodology to be continued. A relative small project has impacted significantly and has led to sustainable results.