The Influence Of Orality/Literacy Of Source Text On Non-Fluencies In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpretation

In conference interpreting, the speakers’ choice of speech delivery mode, such as manuscript speech or impromptu talk, can influence task difficulty of simultaneous interpretation(SI). Written texts such as manuscript speech as source text(ST) usually pose great difficulty to SI. It is agreed that oral texts such as impromptu talk are easier for SI than written texts(Setton, 1999), and the SI performance on oral texts is better than that on written texts. With features high lexical density, long sentences, and complex structures, written texts definitely affect SI performance. Through observation of fluency of SI performance, the influence of orality and literacy on SI performance can be quantified. This study aims to discover how orality/literacy of ST influences student interpreters’ performance in Chinese-English SI, especially the fluency.Since the idea was proposed in Fu Jen University where the author has been there for a semester as an exchange student, the author invited twelve subjects attending the Chinese-English SI class at Graduate Institute of Cross-Cultural Studies, Fu Jen University with similar English proficiency and SI training background, among which 6 are Grade 2 students from Taiwan National Normal University and the other 6 are from Fu Jen University. They were asked to do SI on one written text(manuscript speech) and one oral text(impromptu talk) from Chinese to English. Their recordings were transcribed to establish a corpus. The duration, frequency and type of pauses were identified with the help of Adobe Audition CS 6.The results suggest that the written text was considered to be more difficult by most subjects, because the frequency of non-fluencies was significantly higher. However, individual differences, such as more relevant background knowledge, and a greater command of strategy use could reduce the negative impact.