The Impact Of Speech Rate On Omissions In E-C Consecutive Interpreting

Speech rate has been considered as one of the most important variables which could have an impact on interpreting,and omission is a common phenomenon in interpreting.This thesis is an empirical study involving eight student interpreters with Chinese and English as their A and B languages respectively.In line with Napier's classification of omissions,two interpreting experiments are conducted,one-on-one retrospective interviews are made,and student interpreters' output are compared with the English source speeches.Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted to analyze the omissions made by the subjects at two different speech rates.After that,Gile's Effort Model is adopted as a theoretical framework to explain why those omissions are incurred on the basis of the interviews.The experiment results show that:1)Five types of omissions are observed at the two speeches with different rates;they are conscious strategic omissions,conscious intentional omissions,conscious unintentional omissions,conscious receptive omissions and unconscious omissions.Moreover,in English-Chinese(hereinafter E-C)consecutive interpreting(hereinafter CI),the number of conscious omissions is much greater than that of unconscious ones.2)Speech rate does have an impact on omissions in E-C consecutive interpreting.When a speech goes faster,the number of omissions increases;conscious intentional omissions account for the largest percentage when the speech is delivered at the lower rate,and conscious unintentional omissions take up the largest proportion in student interpreters' interpreting of a speech of a higher rate.In addition,more conscious strategic omissions are observed at the speech with a higher rate.3)Speech comprehension failure and notes-related problem triggers are the main contributors to omissions.