Quantifiable Indicators For Judging Source Material Difficulty In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

In teaching interpreting, the management of source material difficulty is one important aspect of progressive training. Because of the scarcity of researches on the issue in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting, this thesis conducts a relevant empirical study based on an experiment. The thesis proposes five quantifiable indicators to measure source material difficulty:word frequency, ratio of complex sentence, new information density, switch of subject, and speed. Under the topic of the2008financial crisis, the experiment selected5typical source materials to be interpreted by12students who had received professional interpreting training. The experiment recorded, transcribed, and analyzed the students’interpreting. To ensure a holistic view, the thesis also compared the results drawn from the five indicators with expert opinions, participants’feedbacks, and evaluation of the participants’performance. Though the experiment did not achieve a sole, definite sequence of the source material difficulty, it did prove that the speaker’s identity could largely affect the difficulty of the material:in the experiment, official’s speeches are the easiest to interpret, followed by expert’s lectures, and commentator’s explanation in a feature program is the most difficult. Moreover, the experiment also showed that teachers and students could have very different opinions on the difficulty of the same source material. Therefore, teachers must collect students’feedbacks during the material selection and training so that the courses can be more pertinent and efficient. The conclusions have significant implications to the teaching of Chinese-English consecutive interpreting.