An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Unfamiliar Phonemic Deviation On The English-to-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting Performance

Conference interpreters often encounter deviated accents in international conferences. It is a pity, however, that previous studies about the influence of accented English, particularly the phonemic deviation in accents, are weak in empirical basis and/or lacking in statistical evidences. In the light of this, the present thesis adopts an empirical approach to probe into the influence of unfamiliar phonemic deviation on the English-to-Chinese consecutive interpreting. Two groups of thirty junior interpreting trainees, with Chinese as their A language and English B language, were involved in this experiment. The experimental group students were introduced about the phonemic features of East African English within one extra 80-minute lesson, while the control group remained ignorant of these characteristics of the accent. Given this accent knowledge gap, two groups were assigned to the same interpreting tasks, one RP accent speech and one East African accent speech. Above all, this experiment attempts to answer the following three research questions: (1) Does unfamiliar phonemic deviation exert a negative impact on E-to-C consecutive interpreting performance on the part of student interpreters? If yes, how does it possibly affect the interpreting process, especially the note-taking step in the Phrase I (Gile 1995)? (2) Do those student interpreters who have received the accent introduction significantly outperform those who have not? (3) What pedagogical implications can be drawn in the light of the experimental findings?The thesis compares the performances (accuracy score) of two groups, notes taken by the students and questionnaire data with the help of SPSS 13.0. Data analysis shows that (1) Unfamiliar phonemic deviation exerts a negative impact on E-to-C consecutive interpreting overall performance, in a way of consuming more efforts than what are available. This leads to the phenomenon of fewer notes taken and finally lowered accuracy in interpreting; (2) Student interpreters who have received accent introduction in the lesson tend to significantly outperform those who have not. (3) Drawing upon the above-mentioned findings from the experiment, the thesis puts forward suggestions on incorporating accent introduction into the teaching syllabus of consecutive interpreting. The choices of representative English accents can be guided by Kachru's "three concentric circles". Students are also advised to raise their awareness of getting familiar with major varieties of Englishes, which is an indispensible component of interpreters' knowledge for languages.