The present study presents an experiment to investigate 1) whether judged fluency correlates with judged accuracy of consecutive interpreting performance; and 2) whether and how judged fluency can... Show moreThe present study presents an experiment to investigate 1) whether judged fluency correlates with judged accuracy of consecutive interpreting performance; and 2) whether and how judged fluency can be predicted on the basis of acoustic measures such as automatically calculated temporal measures of speech quality. In the experiment, ten raters judged six major quality measures related to accuracy and fluency of the consecutive interpreting performance (in this study from Chinese into English) recorded from seven BA trainees and five MA trainees based on the same recorded source speech. Six consecutive interpretations per participants were recorded, two of which were analyzed acoustically by means of the speech analysis tool PRAAT. The pauses detected by PRAAT and the disfluencies transcribed and labeled manually were automatically counted by the text analysis computer program of AWK, based on which 12 acoustic measures of fluency were calculated. The results show that 1) there is a strong positive correlation between judged accuracy and judged fluency in consecutive interpreting; 2) there are strong correlations between judged fluency and objective acoustic measures of fluency in consecutive interpreting; and 3) effective speech rate appears to be the best predictor of judged fluency in consecutive interpreting. The other important determinants of judged interpreting fluency are number of filled pauses, articulation rate, and mean length of pause. The results have practical implications for both developing an automatic assessment tool of fluency facilitating consecutive interpreting testing as well as for consecutive interpreting pedagogy. Show less
The present study investigates the effect of the explicit teaching of prosodic features on developing word recognition skills with interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were... Show moreThe present study investigates the effect of the explicit teaching of prosodic features on developing word recognition skills with interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were composed. All were native speakers of Farsi who studied English translation and interpreting at the BA level at the State University of Arak, Iran. Participants were categorized into two groups at random, but with equal division between genders (9 female and 9 male students in each group). No significant differences in English language skills (TOEFL scores) could be established between the groups. Participants took a pretest of word recognition skill before starting the program. The control group received exercises in listening comprehension, while the experimental group spent part of the time on theoretical explanation and practical exercises developing conscious knowledge of prosodic features of English, such as word stress. The total instruction time was the same for both groups, i.e. 8 hours. Students then took a posttest of word recognition skills. The results show that prosodic feature awareness training did yield a statistically significant improvement of word recognition skills. The result has pedagogical implications for researchers in the field of second language teaching, instructors, curriculum designers, conductors of interpreting programs for training future interpreters, material producers and all who are involved in language study and pedagogy. Show less
