On The Assistance Of Number Recognition During Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

In recent years, great progress has been made in interpretation-related technologies, especially speech recognition, which can now produce quite accurate results. Faced with challenges from technologies, human interpreters should embrace them and use them to serve their interpretation work. Using speech recognition might be a good way to reduce the memory burden of the interpreters.This paper studies speech recognition in relation to number recognition. The author develops an application that can provide the interpreters with a transcript while highlighting all the numbers in it. In this way, the interpreters can easily check their own notes with the numbers on the screen. A comparative test is conducted to find out whether the application can reduce the memory burden of the interpreters while maintaining their output quality during the Chinese-English consecutive interpreting. The result shows that the application does increase the accuracy and fluency in translating numbers and allow the interpreters to focus more on other information. Those interpreters with spare effort can also choose to check against the transcript provided by the application to improve the quality of their interpretation.