Shaping Forces Of Interpreting Performance In Web-broadcast Simultaneous Interpreting

The web-broadcast is a media presentation that employs streaming media technology to distribute certain content to many simultaneous listeners or viewers through the Internet.It creates a new platform and a new working mode of interpreting and interpreters don’t need to work on the spot and the job can be finished through the remote live platform.However,in web-broadcast settings,interpreters should confront the judgment from a mass of net audience.It will undoubtedly increase the exposure and mental burden of the interpreters and make it more difficult to finish the interpreting task.The data of this research is selected from the New York press conference on COVID-19 held by governor Andrew Cuomo on March 31.The interpretations are coming from two You Tube channels.One is from NTD,the other is from Chinese In LA.The duration of the interpreting goes to 64 minutes.After manual transcribing and aligning,data of 14,368 Chinese words in TT1 and 18,369 Chinese words in TT2 is ready for the research.This research is developed based on the parameters of gauging interpreting performance proposed by Wang.B.H.(2014).First,this research gives a detailed description of interpreting performance from dimensions of accuracy,appropriacy,and fluency by using the methods of comparison and description,and then analyzes the shaping forces of interpreting performance by referring to Gile’s Effort Models.The following findings can be presented.1)At the accuracy dimension,omission is a common phenomenon.The frequency of errors is controlled into a low percentage.2)At the appropriacy dimension,occurrence of infelicities is no more than 3%.3)At the fluency dimension,interpreting performance shows significant differences.The gap in the total frequency of pauses,repeats and self-repairs between these two interpreters goes to 68%.After sorting out and analyzing the statistics,this research puts forward that the following items are the major shaping forces of interpreting performance: 1)Cognitive conditions on-site including acoustic quality and speech rate.2)Interpreting competence including bilingual competence,extra-linguistic knowledge,and interpreting skills.3)Language specificity including sentence structures and idiomatic expressions.Therefore,for improving interpreting performance,it is required that interpreters should enhance interpreting competence.Furthermore,the negative effects of cognitive conditions on-site and language specificity ought to be taken into consideration.