An Experimental Research On The Inffluence Of Speech Rates On The Quality Of Student Interpreters’ E-C Simultaneous Interpretation

The quality of simultaneous interpretation will be affected by various factors,among which the speech rate is an important factor.And speaker’s speech speed will make a difference to the accuracy and fluency of the interpreter’s output.However,the speaker’s speech speed is also an external factor beyond the interpreter’s control.Therefore,it is of great significance to study to what extent the interpreter’s output quality will be affected in different speed situations,analyze the internal reasons and find out the corresponding coping strategies.Eight Chinese native speakers were invited to conduct simultaneous interpretation experiments at high,medium and low speech rate respectively.Based on Gile’s cognitive load model,the purpose of this study was to study the following questions by combining quantitative description with qualitative analysis :1)How the speech rate affect the performance of the student interpreters? 2)Why the speech rate can affect the performance of the student interpreters?Through the experiment and analysis,the author concludes:firstly,student interpreters’ performances are affected by the speech rate as follows :1)the accuracy of the student interpreters at low speech rate is better than that at high speech rate,but fluency is worsen than that at high speech rate;2)the accuracy of the student interpreters at low speech rate is slightly better than that at medium speech rate,but its fluency is much worsen than at medium speech rate.Secondly,the poor quality of simultaneous interpretation at the fast speech rate is due to the increase of the amount of information received by student interpreters in unit time,which brings burden to their listening and memory,so the number of misinterpreting and omissions in interpreting increases accordingly,and the frequency of disfluency also increases.The slow speech rate lengthens the interpreter’s EVS and brings a huge short-term memory burden to the interpreters,which leads to the poor quality interpretation.To sum up,through the combination of experimental method,interview method and questionnaire survey,this experiment shows that in the process of simultaneous interpretation of English-Chinese,the quality of simultaneous interpretation is the best at the medium speed of the speech,and the fast or slow speed of source language will lead to the poor quality of the simultaneous interpretation.Based on the analysis of statistical data and specific examples,the paper proposes strategies that may help interpreters to deal with fast speech rate,including reasonable summary,early prediction,simplified expression,selective omission,and strategies to deal with slow speech speed,including flexibly using splitting method and waiting strategies.So through this experimental study,the author hopes to provide some reference for interpretation teaching and interpreter interpretation practice.