An Effort Model Based Contrastive Experiment On The Performance In Simultaneous Interpretation With/out Text

The French scholar Daniel Gile has proposed the famous Effort Model based on alot of experiments and research on French-English and French-German simultaneousinterpretation with/out text. D. Gile modeled simultaneous interpretation with/out textas a process consisting of three Efforts, the Listening and Analysis Effort (Effort L),the Short-term Memory Effort M (Effort M), and the Speech production Effort P(Effort P), plus a Coordination Effort C (Effort C), which is required to coordinate thethree Efforts.Simultaneous Interpretation without Text=L+M+P+CD. Gile has studied Sight Translation in Consecutive Interpretation, andSimultaneous Interpretation with Text. In this thesis, we will study the SimultaneousInterpretation with Text.In simultaneous interpretation with text, D. Gile pointed out that the Listeningand Analysis Effort becomes a Reading Effort, and the Production Effort remains.Since the interpreters can retrieve the information from the text any time,simultaneous interpretation with text does not require any efforts on Memory.Therefore, simultaneous interpretation with text involves two efforts, namely ReadingEffort (Effort R) and Speech Production Effort (Effort P), and plus the CoordinationEffort (Effort C), which is required to coordinate the former two efforts.Simultaneous Interpretation with text=R+P+CThe Effort Model has great influence in the research and practice of interpreting.First, it provides fundamental theoretical basis for both native and foreign researchers.They continue to develop the theory and make new achievements on the basis ofEffort Model. Secondly, it provides a practical training method for interpretinglearners and provides guidance on the teaching of interpreting. More and morecolleges and universities have opened intermediate and advanced courses ofinterpretation, and the Effort Model can be an important reference in teaching andtraining pedagogy. Whether for beginners or for the experienced interpreters, the model can help to improve their interpreting level if they are trained on elements inthe model.D. Gile holds that simultaneous interpretation with text is a difficult exercisebecause interpreters focus more attention on the text, namely they spend more effortson reading the text so that they might ignore the speed of speech. The present studyapplies D. Gile’s Effort Model theory to the demonstration of whether or not having atext has any effect on the performance of English-Chinese interpreters. Supported bythe above mentioned theory and based on the previous studies, the thesis plans toanswer the following questions:1. Is there any difference between the performance of subjects with a largershort-term memory capacity and those with a smaller short-term memory capacityin English-Chinese interpretation?2. Are there marked differences between the performance of interpreters focusingtheir attention on text and listening and those focusing their attention on listeningin English-Chinese interpretation?3. If there are differences between the performance of interpreters focusing theirattention on text and those focusing their attention on listening in English-Chineseinterpretation, under what conditions are better interpretation results be achieved?4. If there are differences between the performances of interpreters focusing theirattention on text and those focusing their attention on listening in English-Chinese,what are the causes of the differences?The study is an empirical research based on experimental tests on27second-yearpostgraduates majoring in English Interpretation in Jilin University. The study isdivided into two stages: a pre-test and an experiment on simultaneous interpretationwith/out text. The pre-test is mainly aimed at testing the short-term memory capacityof interpreters, and choosing qualified subjects for the experiment. A short piece ofaudio file (20seconds) is chosen for the test of short-term memory, containing10chunks. According to the study of memory in cognitive psychology, short-termmemory capacity contains about7±2chunks(Chunks means integrated informationunit or information segments). Twenty-seven subjects participated in the pre-test and the top10and the reciprocal10subjects on the rank according to their test results willbe chosen to attend the experiment. Then, for the top10subjects, we put even numbersubjects in group1, odd number subjects in group2, and the same method will beadopted on the reciprocal10subjects. This will ensure the comparability of every twogroups (Group1and Group2, Group3and Group4) in terms of memory capacity.The four groups are arranged as follows:Group1and Group2: with large short-term memory capacityGroup3and Group4: with small short-term memory capacityFor the experiment: a video material (5minutes) will be prepared for the fourgroups. It is American Present Barak Obama’s National Address to America’s Schoolchildren. The speaker has no accent and the speed is moderate. On the basis of theresults of the pre-test, each group will be assigned either to do simultaneousinterpretation with/out text. The four groups are rearranged as follows:Group1(large memory capacity)+Group3(small memory capacity): to dosimultaneous interpretation without textGroup2(large memory capacity)+Group4(small memory capacity): to dosimultaneous interpretation with textThe subjects’ short-term memory capacity and the fact whether they have awritten text or not are the two independent variables and the performance ofsimultaneous interpretation with/out text are the dependent variables while otherfactors are controlled as constants. Quantitative analysis is adopted to analyze thegroups’ interpretation performance. Individual group’s interpretation performance isanalyzed in terms of the accuracy of the target language, smoothness and informationcontent of the reproduction. After comparing the performances of each group, theauthor draws the following conclusions:1. There is difference between the performance of subjects with different short-termmemory capacities2. With subjects of similar short-term memory capacity, those performingsimultaneous interpretation with text do much better than those performingsimultaneous interpretation without text. 3. The subjects who do simultaneous interpretation with text perform better thanthose who do simultaneous interpretation without text.4. This might result from the possibility that the subjects might have focused theirattention solely on the text and ignored the audio stimuli, and the subjects withEnglish as their second language generally have better reading ability than listeningability.The experiment applied D. Gile’s Effort Model and conducted a contrastivestudy between simultaneous interpretation with out text and simultaneousinterpretation with text and drew the conclusion that with other variables heldconstant the subjects performed better in simultaneous interpretation with text than insimultaneous interpretation without text. This experimental result has implications forthe practices and pedagogy in training interpreters.