A Comparative Study On Quality Of E-C Simultaneous Interpretation In Different Ways To Wear Headphones

This thesis explores the impact of ways of wearing headphones on the quality of interpreted texts through empirical study on the basis of Daniel Gile’s Effort Model. The thesis takes a TED speech about water resource management as the test material to analyze the interpreters’ performance through quantative study and qualitative study. The subjects of the experiment are divided into three groups:single-ear group, double-ear group and one-and-a-half-ear group.In the quantative study, the interpretation of the one-and-a-half-ear group is the most accurate and the accuracy rate of the single-ear group is slightly higher than that of the double-ear group. On fluency, the one-and-a-half-ear group shows much more non-communicative pauses than the other two groups. There are few differences among the three groups in terms of fillers. On repetition of words which will not affect much on the quality of the interpretation, the three groups didn’t show much difference. Moreover, the interpreters of one-and-a-half-ear performed better on sentence reorganization and false start, which have important bearings on communication between speakers and audience.In qualitative study, most of the interpreters shortened their EVS to reduce their effort distribution pressure. Since double-ear-input interpreters need to spend more effort on speech production, they may not well understand and analyze the original texts. Double-ear group and single-ear group automatically reorganized the sentence to produce target text in line with Chinese grammatical rules. Although most of the one-and-a-half-input interpreters didn’t choose the strategy of reorganization, they also produced fluent and natural texts because of the balanced efforts. Moreover, the three groups all automatically omit some unnecessary content to reduce their pressure.Generally, one-and-a-half-ear input is the recommended way for English-Chinese simultaneous interpreters but double-ear input is not suggested. Sometimes interpreters may also choose single-ear input during the interpreting process according to their preference.