| Directionality has been a controversial topic in simultaneous interpreting(SI).This study examines whether directionality affects SI quality.Nine MTI students at Tianjin Normal University were chosen as participants of the experiment,which consisted of simulated SI of two pieces of materials with similar themes,one in Chinese and one in English.The author collected the participants’ SI recordings and retrospective interview recordings and transcribed them into text.Then based on Gile’s Effort Model and participants’ interview,the quality of participants’ interpreting was analyzed from three aspects: accuracy,completeness,and fluency.Through the experiment and interviews,the author found that all the 9participants made errors in the above-mentioned three aspects,among which completeness had the highest frequency of errors,followed by accuracy and fluency.Generally speaking,the participants performed better in A-B interpreting.In listening and analyzing,students can fully comprehend and memorize the information in the source language,which results in fewer omissions.In terms of expression,students can use the vocabulary they have mastered to summarize and re-express the source language,which will make the expression more concise and accurate.In contrast,in B-A SI,student interpreters do not understand the source language well enough,resulting in more misunderstandings and omissions.And there is more pressure to listen to the foreign language,which is more likely to result in an unbalanced distribution of energy.The author has reached the conclusion that directionality has a certain,but not decisive,influence on student interpreters’ SI.The quality of SI is more determined by the language proficiency of the interpreters.Apart from that,factors like information density,grammatical difference between the two languages,complexity of source sentence substructure,effort distribution,length of EVS,etc.all play their roles in SI quality. |
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