The present report deals with the listeners’ preference of the Japanese-into-English interpretations performed by non-native English speaking interpreters. According to Collados [1] (1992), monotonous intonation affects the listeners’ evaluation of simultaneous interpretation. Kurz [2] (1993) investigated users’ assessment on conference interpreters and found that the native accent was the least important quality criterion. Meanwhile, according to Anderson, Johnson, and Koehler [3] (1992), prosody was the most frequently associated factors with the pronunciation scores of evaluations of students’ speech. Rennert [4] (1993) suggests that fluency is one of the key features of simultaneous interpretation. In order to examine the factors affecting good interpretations, the study was designed and 11 native and non-native speakers of English were asked to listen to the interpretations performed by seven student interpreter in order to examine the audience’s preference. The listeners were asked to grade the interpretations based on their own general impression by using a five-point scale and make comments on the interpretations. It was found that the factors suggested in the previous studies were important, yet there was another factor that affected listeners’ preference.
Cite as: Takahashi, K. (2018) What are good Japanese-into-English interpretations to the audience. Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018), 116-119, doi: 10.21437/ISAPh.2018-21
@inproceedings{takahashi18_isaph,
author={Kinuko Takahashi},
title={{What are good Japanese-into-English interpretations to the audience}},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. International Symposium on Applied Phonetics (ISAPh 2018)},
pages={116--119},
doi={10.21437/ISAPh.2018-21}
}