A Comparative Study Of The Influence On Interpretation Quality Exert By Different Modality Situations

Multimodality theory is an important linguistic theory in western countries. It hasbeen widely applied into Discourse Analysis since its establishment. After the theorywas introduced into visual dimension, the scope of linguistic study was greatlyexpanded. Interpretation, by its nature, is a special kind of communicative behaviorand requires interpreters to capture multimodal information sources, which are oftencomposed of visual information and audio information. The present thesis is aimed tostudy the difference of interpretation quality between different experimentalenvironments. The study is based on the framework for assessing interpretationquality, and approaches interpretation quality by drawing upon several parameterswithin the framework.The thesis attempts to answer following two questions:1) Whether the increase of number of modality will exert a positiveinfluence on interpretation quality? Will interpreters/subjects undermultimodal environment while interpreting perform significantly betterthan whose who work under less number of modality mono-modalityenvironment?2) Will the change of modality in terms of number exert possible influenceon some parameters of interpretation quality? Which parameter will beinfluenced positively/negatively by the change of modality environment?Will there be significant differences in parameters of interpretationquality between different modality environments?Subjects for present research are chosen from Nanjing University of Technology,and all of them are junior students in English who have studied interpretation inclassroom for one year. They were divided into three groups as required by theresearch, with25students in each group. Before the research started, a small test wasarranged for all of them. The result shows that each group of subjects has obtainedsimilar degree of interpretation proficiency, and no significant differences between the three groups were found. During the research, they were asked to complete theinterpretation task in different modality settings: mono-modality, bi-modality andmultimodality. Soft-wares used in present research include Cool Edit Pro2.1,Wordsmith, SPSS, the latter two of which were used for data analysis. It is founded inpresent research that:In terms of fidelity, subjects under bi-modality environment performed betterthan the other two groups. An analysis of the three sub-parameters set for assessingfidelity shows that subjects under bi-modality environment performed better whileprocessing information units and no differences were found in other twosub-parameters, namely, information layer and information structure.In terms of accuracy, subjects under multimodality environment performed thebest. No significant differences were found in self-repairs while subjects undermultimodality environment acquired a more desirable right/wrong ratio forinterpretation.In terms of fluency, subjects under bi-modality environment produced muchmore pauses and dis-fluent repetitions, which helps to show that, to some extent,fluency of subjects under bi-modality is the worst compared to the other two groups.Besides, conjunctions and ungrammatical structures appeared much more often undermultimodality setting.In terms of acceptability, scores for the three groups are nearly the same and nosignificant differences were found.With research findings listed above, the present thesis is expected to offerfollowing implications:Theoretically, a tentative framework for interpretation quality assessment wasestablished in present research and may be used in similar studies later for reference.Besides, a linguistic theory was introduced to explain and analyze interpretation inpresent thesis, which helps to broaden the scope for interpretation research.Pedagogically, interpretation teachers should pay attention to the relation betweeninput environment and the performance of student on classroom interpretationteaching, and design different forms of teaching according to certain teaching goals, for example, to improve the fluency of students in interpretation learning, so as tohelp them make to-the-point progress in interpretation learning.