Audience’s Expectation Of Interpreting Quality:a Package Perspective

As interpreting is gathering momentum in China, more and more people get to know about interpreting and many of them even become interpreting service users. As a professional service, its quality lies at the heart of this profession.At the early stage of interpreting studies, many researches try to justify and prove which is more important:fidelity pr package? Consensus has been reached that fidelity comes before packaging. However, when assessing the interpreter’s performance, many users resort to packaging since it left the first impression on them. By reviewing their works, I found only a few research focuses on the issue of different aspect of packaging, for instance, pronunciation, pauses and self-repair’s impact on users’quality perception.This thesis aims to probe into users’quality expectation of conference interpreting. Fluency is an important part of interpreting package. Since previous research mainly ask the subjects do the ranking or rate the relative importance of each quality parameters, few scholars try to differentiate different types of disfluencies’ impact on the audience’s quality expectation. My thesis adopts the questionnaire and interview technique to look into this issue. Two separate ranking assignments were designed, so that I can examine user’s quality expectation of disfluency related criteria and non-disfleuncy related criteria.Fifty questionnaires were distributed and forty pieces were collected. Silent pauses are the most unbearable disfluency. Excessive self-repair comes in the second place. Filled pauses take the third place. Unstable pace is at the bottom of the list, being the least unbearable disfluency type. In terms of filled pauses, there are variance caused by gender, grade and interpreting related experience.When it comes to non-disfluency related criteria, poor microphone manner is the most annoying factor. Monotonous tone, poor pronunciation and intonation, bad voice projection takes up the3rd,4th and5th place.Given limited sample and some of the constraints of the research design, these are only the preliminary findings. To generalize the conclusion, further study is needed.