An Experimental Study Of Indian-accent And Its Influence On English-Chinese Interpreting

During the interpreting work, interpreters may encounter different accents amongwhich Indian-accent is the most common one. While，from the beginning of learningEnglish, our study materials including the listening material are from standard English.So，for those interpreters who have got used to the standard pronunciation, accentedEnglish will bring a lot of troubles in listening comprehension and some other aspectsso that the interpreter may suffer from much more pressures during the interpretingprocess especially when they never did it before. To solve this problem, I made someresearches and analysis on Indian-accent and amended the existing pronunciation ruleswhich have been concluded by the others and present some new findings. Thus, it willhelp the interpreters to understand accent English better to make the whole process ofinterpretation more smooth.This paper relies on two experiments. In the ifrst experiment, specific materialswill be recorded by Indian-accent speakers (Indians or Pakistanis with similar accent).By using praat, a software for phonetic analysis, the author can obtain a lot of data. Byknowing the differences from a comparison between the previous research results andthe data, the author can build a new system of pronunciation rules betweenIndian-accent and Received Pronunciation. The second experiment aims to prove thepracticality of the pronunciation rules for interpreting. During the process, the authorwill ask interpreters whose majors are interpreting, translation and linguistics tointerpret the same paragraph twice. At the ifrst time, the interpreter will just do theinterpret without any help so that the author can get their original understandings ofthe paragraph. In the second round of interpreting, the interpreter has had a roughknowing about the pronunciation rules. Making a comparison of the interpreting in tworounds’, we will know if the pronunciation rules would improve the interpreters’performance or not.Comparison between the previous research results and my experimental data canreveal the mistakes or one-sided conclusions of the now existing pronunciation rules(P23). The author will point them out in chapter four with specific cases. For thesecond experiment, the performance of the interpreter is mainly determined by fourparameters which are response time, fluency, language accuracy and informationfidelity. By comparing the four parameters of interpreting in each round，the authorfinds out that the pronunciation rules concluded form the ifrst experiment do help the interpreters to improve their work. All the parameters have been improved in differentdegrees，among which the most obvious improvement lies in information fidelity.