Comparison Of Accuracy Between Simultaneous Interpreting And Consecutive Interpreting

Conference interpreting is mainly comprised of consecutive interpreting (CI, or consecutive, C) and simultaneous interpreting (SI, or simultaneous, S) in terms of working modes, which are widely used in various meetings and conferences. However, through conversations with ordinary people, or non-professionals, the author discovers that simultaneous alone is where the interest lies and the by-word for conferece interpreter. Trainees at conference interpreting projects unconsciously compare the two modes during training and there is, with little empirical research, consensus among the interpreters concerning the relative accuracy between CI and SI. The opinion in non-professionals is that SI is more difficult and therefore less accurate than CI.The author conducts a tentative study on the relative accuracy between the two modes among interpreters with a language combination of Chinese A and English B and applies the conclusion derived from a small-scale empirical study to pedagogy and practice. An experiment is designed on the basis of a similar study performed by Daniel Dile, who tested 20 professional interpreters of French-English language combination with over 5 years of experience on the market. The conclusion is that"in the case of the particular speech studied and its interpretation, the simultaneous mode is more 'accurate' than the consecutive mode". Later, a Chinese student Bai Yan Fei emulated Gile's experiment and supplemented the study in terms of language combination and interpreters of different professional level. Having 20 Chinese pre-professionals interpret the same speech, Bai arrived at a diagonally different conclusion. The authors has chosen new materials and examinees in order to compare with the previous two researches.6 professionals and 6 pre-professionals are respectively devided at randomized allocation into two groups and make up four groups with three examinees each. Each examinee interprets simultaneous for one paragraph and consecutive for the other in accordance with pre-determined procedures. The result is that change of topic and into conversation does not have a marked impact on performance, which is over 70% on average. The professionals outperform the pre-professionals on the whole and do not record significant difference between SI and CI modes, even with SI slightly better than CI in some cases. Whereas the pre-professionals have more difficulty delivering SI in harder speech than easier ones. SI tends to fare worth in problem-prone segments, standing at only 50% of accuracy compared with around 70% for CI.Generally speaking, under English-Chinese language combination, CI is slightly better than SI in terms of accuracy. But pre-professionals deliver CI at a phenomenal superiority, especially for tougher tasks. Facing the problem-prone situation of false start, lack of equivalent, work-order changes, SI commits remarkably more mistakes than CI. Professionals are more accurate than pre-professionals in both modes, especially SI, and in the problem-prone segments.Trainingwise, the discrepancy in accuracy at the beginning of simultaneous practice will be gradually eliminated by sufficient amount of practice and accumulation. Professionals with enough exposure to market will have a better command of SI, sometimes even better than CI in terms of accuracy, which means the choice of mode will all but influence interpreting output. Therefore, clients and other non-professionals have every reason to trust the accuracy of SI. Meanwhile, consecutive is not necessarily easier than simultaneous. Constant practice and improvement of CI should be stuck to by professionals. Once the message that CI is under no less pressure than SI and is equally demanding in terms professional skills gets across to clients, there will be profound repercussions in the market.