An Empirical Study Of Ear-Voice Span In High-speech-rate E-C Simultaneous Interpreting

In recent years,simultaneous interpreting has been widely used in international conferences due to its high efficiency.Thanks to the opening-up policy,China is playing an active role in the international society,and the demand for simultaneous interpreting services is also increasing.Ear-voice span(EVS)is the time difference between the input of source language and the output of target language.Studies show that sentence length,ST delivery rate and interpreters’ capacity all affect the length of EVS to varying degrees,and the EVS,in turn,affects the interpreters’ performance.In interpretation practice,interpreters can prepare for the background knowledge and speaker’s accent,however,the speech delivery rate is a variable that the interpreters cannot predict nor control.Therefore,by researching the EVS in high-speech-rate simultaneous interpreting,we can help interpreters improve their performance.The thesis,based on Daniel Gile’s effort model,aims to conduct an empirical study on ear-voice span in high-speech-rate simultaneous interpreting.Eight student interpreters from the Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation,Beijing Foreign Studies University are invited to interpret for a Davos panel discussion with an average speech rate of 180 wpm.The paper then discusses how ear-voice span affects simultaneous interpreters’ performance,and summarizes four strategies to cope with high speech rate,namely omission,summarization,reformulation and opposition.The study showed that the average length of EVS in English into Chinese ranges from 1 to 3 seconds under high speech rate.The length of EVS has no obvious effect on the output.According to Gile’s effort model,when the ST delivery rate increases,the interpreters face more pressure in listening and comprehension as well as coordination,and thus they need to shorten the EVS to reduce memory effort so as to deliver better translation.However,in real scenarios,the quality of the output is affected by a series of factors,and the length of EVS is just an insignificant factor.The interpreters can leverage coping techniques such as omission,summarization,reformulation and opposition to improve their performance.