An Empirical Study On Quantifiable Indicators For Measuring Source Material Difficulty In E-C Simultaneous Interpreting

To hone their interpreting skills,learners need to collect source materials of varying types and difficulties,but they usually find it difficult to grade the vast number of audio and video source materials according to levels of difficulty.To address this issue,the study aims to propose a set of systematic indicators for measuring source material difficulty in English-Chinese Simultaneous interpretation,and to shift away from the current practice of selecting source materials primarily by expert judgment.The study selected three source materials in the field of education,politics and science and technology from the corpora built by the National Center for Advanced Training in Translation&Interpretation(ATTI).The study assumes that difficulty indicators may include the speaker's accent,speech rate,lexical difficulty,syntax complexity,logic,culture and background knowledge,and the author ranks the materials accordingly.At the same time,drawing from the previous researchers,the study conducts a quantitative analysis of the source materials using indicators of readability level,information density and new concept density and tries to verify their effectiveness.Participants of the experiment are seleceted from the students of the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation in their first or second year of interpretation studying.The author broadcast the source audio,recorded and evaluated the subjects'simultaneous interpretation performance.Quantitative and qualitative analysis of simultaneous performance is performed based on SI output's information coverage,lexical difficulty and syntactic complexity.Finally,the study analyzed the gap between the subjects' performance and the expert judgment and looks into the deviation in the measurement of source material difficulty.Readability level,information density and new concept density are found to show little correlation with source material difficulty,but lexical difficulty and syntactic complexity are better predictors of the source material difficulty.High speech rate increases the frequency of errors,as shown by the significant deterioration of interpreting performance.Lack of coherence,logic,and clarity may also contain the interpreters' ability in processing the information.In addition,source material difficulty influences sophisticated learners more than novice interpreters.