On The Impact Of Paralanguage On SI Performance:An Audience's Perspective

Nonverbal communication is a crucial part of human communication,which,however,has been ignored as a subject of research for quite a long time in comparison with verbal communication.In reality,in normal communication,meanings are sometimes conveyed solely by nonverbal components.Interpreting can be seen as a special type of communication whose ultimate goal is to facilitate the effective communication among people speaking different languages.To ensure the communicative effects,both verbal and nonverbal messages are involved.Paralanguage and bodily activities like facial expressions,gestures are the main components of nonverbal behavior.However,in interpreting studies,paralinguistic factors are explored as a kind of input variables of interpreting and the research focus lies in their influence on the interpreters' comprehension of the source language,with less attention paid to its impact on the information transmission from interpreters to the audience.In simultaneous interpreting(SI),when interpreters can only convey information through microphones to the audience wearing headphones,paralanguage stands out from other nonverbal components and deserves more attention to its impact on the listeners.Quality evaluation is a significant topic in interpreting studies and has been explored from different perspectives.The perspective of listeners can help interpreters better understand the needs and expectations of users and improve their interpreting performance.Through various surveys,consensus has been reached that listeners tend to attach more importance to content related criteria over form related ones.However,it does not mean that form related criteria can be neglected,since the expectations of users are not always in conformity with their feedback.Expectations may explain what is believed to be important by the audience,while feedback can tell what really matters in a real situation.This thesis aims to explore the impact of paralanguage on the evaluation of simultaneous interpreting from the perspective of the audience.The paper adopts a questionnaire to investigate the audience's real feedback of interpreting quality,trying to find out whether paralanguage can influence their evaluation of the overall interpreting performance or not.The participants are invited to rate the interpreting they hear on the whole and on six paralinguistic aspects.In total,80 copies of the questionnaire were distributed and 74 valid ones were collected.The research findings show that all six paralinguistic factors can influence the evaluation of the overall interpreting performance to some extent.Intonation,filled pauses and tempo are found to have a strong correlation with interpreting evaluation.Some interrelations also exist among paralinguistic factors.According to the audience's feedback,although content remains the first concern of the participants,bad paralinguistic performance in the interpreting output can impair the understanding process of the audience and even lead to loss of information.It is therefore of significance for interpreters to pay more attention to the paralanguage in the interpreting output.In this thesis,the author starts with the explanation of the research background,research purpose and research significance in Chapter One.Following the literature review and theoretical framework in the next two chapters,Chapter Four contains the research design and data analysis of the thesis.The last chapter provides a summary of the research findings and presents some implications for future research and training of interpreting.