An Experimental Research On The Influence Of Australian Accent On The Consecutive Interpreting Performance Of Students Interpreters

This research is theoretically based on Daniel Gile's Effort Model.It aims to explore impacts of the Australian accent on students' consecutive interpreting,a peculiar type of recognition activity.To this end,three questions are raised: 1.Does the Australian accent of the source language affect students' CI performance? 2.What are the aspects being influenced ? 3.What are the potential reasons of the influence?In order to answer the questions,this research takes American source language as the experimental pretest.The experimental variables include theme,words amount,speech speed,sentence length,background sound and speaker's gender,which are properly controlled,with accents as arguments and output dependent variables.They are analyzed comprehensively with vocabulary tests,questionnaires and interviews,which are designed to assist the experiment and are conducted immediately after the interpretation.In this study,28 translation-major juniors from a northeast university are selected as subjects.The whole process is recorded.The overall performance and interference of the student interpreters were investigated through notes,recordings,transcriptions,vocabulary quizzes,questionnaires and interviews.The interpretation output is studied by means of interpretation rate,fluency,etc.This research finds that Australian source language has passive effect on students' interpretation rate,fluency,words dictating and use of strategies.Potential reasons include cognitive overload which influence students' code identification,interpretation,information coding,etc.By studying the influence of Australian source language on the interpreting performance of consecutive interpreters,this study theoretically validates Gile's cognitive effort model,which provides a new dimension of thinking and data support for the teaching and research of consecutive interpreting.In addition,in practice,this study is helpful to enhance student interpreters' practical skills while providing a reference for teachers of this field to pay more attention to the accent variable of interpreting source language when selecting practicing resources that suits students' abilities.It also provides some guidance for the compilation of CI textbooks.