An Experiment Report On The Impacts Of Terminology On The EVS In C-E Simultaneous Interpreting

The concept of ear-voice span(EVS)has the potential to reveal some of the highly demanding cognitive processes underlying simultaneous interpreting(SI).Terminology,which is the set of words and expressions of a specialized domain,is an element that interpreters have to deal with and can significantly influence interpreting process and quality.Therefore,this experiment aims to examine whether there is a correlation between terminology and EVS length and whether EVS variation affects interpretation.Two materials with different density of terminology were interpreted by six participants from China Foreign Affairs University.In the quantitative analysis,material Ⅰ,with five specialized terms,and material Ⅱ,containing 40 terms,were divided into 41 and 43 sense groups respectively and the average EVS of each interpreter was calculated.The result showed that the average EVS of material Ⅱ,4.64 seconds,is longer than that of material Ⅰ,3.16 seconds,and each participant’s EVS of material Ⅱ is longer than that of material Ⅰ.Thus it is concluded that terminology prolonged EVS in this experiment.A questionnaire was designed to further prove the result.In the qualitative analysis,the renditions of the six participants were examined to identify the impacts of long EVS on interpretation.Information loss and inaccuracy are found to be the two biggest problems caused by prolonged EVS.Then,four coping strategies that can help interpreters to deal with terminology during SI and contribute to high-quality interpreting performance were given:generalization,paraphrasing,tactical omission and word-for-word translation.