A Study On The Impact Of Speech Rate On English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting Of Student Interpreters

Speech rate is an important factor affecting the quality of English-Chinese simultaneous interpretation,and is closely related to the accuracy and fluency of interpreters' output.But to what degree will the output quality be affected by speech rates?If student interpreters wish to achieve the best possible performance,what's the optimal speech rate?This study uses the speech rate ofan English address as a variable and adopts empirical research methods to analyze the effect of high,medium and low speech rates on the output accuracy and fluency of studentinterpreters,and to find out under whichrate the interpretercanachieve optimal performance.Based on Seleskovitch's interpretive theory and Tissi'sdisfluencyclassification framework,this study first classified the phenomena affecting the quality of simultaneous interpretation,and then invited nine student interpreters to simultaneously interpret an English address delivered at low,medium and high rates.The numbers of occurrence for each phenomenon were counted and then representative examples of each phenomenon are selected to carry out comparative analysis under three speech rate scenarios.The possible causes of the deficiencies are pointed out,and some feasible countermeasures are proposed according to the specific situation.The findings of the study are as follows:1.under low speech rate,interpreters can achieve the best output accuracy;2.under medium speech rate,the interpreter can achieve the best output fluency.