The Impact Of Familiarity With Accent On C-E Simultaneous Interpreting Performance

China has many dialects and the accents vary so much that people may find it difficult to understand accented Chinese. Despite the Speak Mandarin Campaign, many people speak Chinese with a strong accent. The strong accents of some Chinese speakers at international conferences may impede the process of simultaneous interpretation. When interpreting a speech with an unfamiliar accent, the interpreter tends to devote much processing capacity to listening and analyzing. According to Daniel Gile’s Effort Model, devoting too much capacity to listening would result in low quality interpretation performance. Conversely, interpreting a speech with a familiar accent requires less processing capacity, which would result in a better performance.This paper carries out an empirical study, proving that when interpreting Deng Xiaoping’s speech at the Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly, interpreters who are familiar with Sichuan accent perform much better than those who are not. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, the author draws the following conclusion:1. Interpreters who are familiar with the accent perform better than those who are not;2. Accented words that are especially hard to understand would cause extra difficulties;3. The performance gap would narrow when there are other problem triggers apart from accent;4. The impact of accent is more obvious when the accented words appear at the beginning or in the middle of the sentence;5. Interpreters who are unfamiliar with the accent may make up the meaning of the words they did not catch; and6. Interpreters who are unfamiliar with the accent may get familiar with the accent and their performance would be improved accordingly.