The Influence Of Speech Recognition Tools On MTI Students In C-E Consecutive Interpretation Strategies

Accents can be defined as a way of speaking typical of a particular group of people and especially of the natives or residents of a region.As a vast country,China holds a myriad of accents that affect the interpreter’s listening process,student interpreters in particular.According to Gill’s effort model for interpreting,the interpreter’s energy balance would be hindered by too much effort in listening and analysis,which in turn affects the quality of interpretation.Meanwhile,a series of speech recognition software,among them iFLYREC Simultaneous Interpreting,claims to have high accuracy in recognizing dialectal accents,thus offering students a new tool in accented CI.To study whether speech recognition brings differences to the consecutive interpreting strategies of MTI students,this study experimented with interpretation,post-interpretation interviews,and questionnaires.Two Chinese texts on the field of COVID-19,with similar content and style,were read in southwestern Mandarin（Yichang accent）at a comparable speed to form CI materials for the experiment.Afterward,a total of 12 MTI students of comparable interpretation levels were invited to do consecutive interpreting with and without speech recognition.They were then asked for questionnaires and post-interpretation interviews immediately afterward.The result of the experiment showed that the recognition speed of iFLYREC Simultaneous Interpretation did not affect CI strategies.Every participant turned to sight translation when assisted with speech recognition,even after taking notes.The students favored anticipation,approximation,compression,explicitation,and addition when equipped with speech recognition,and compression,offering an alternative translation in a parallel structure,skipping,transformation,and approximation when without.Among them,approximation and skipping were mainly used to cope with numbers,names,places,and terms.The type and number of strategies for information details and figures increased when speech recognition was available,yet increased for names,places and terms instead because of inaccurate recognition results.However,students interpreted more information and improved accuracy in figures and terms than without speech recognition,whether comparing two outputs of the same student or different students’ outputs for the same material.The results of this thesis suggest that speech recognition software,as exemplified by iFLYREC Simultaneous Interpretation,has an impact on the type and number of strategies used by student interpreters.While speech recognition software may alleviate the stress of accents on students in terms of information details and figures,its names,places and terms are of little help when misrecognized,and it cannot teach students new strategies.However,to realize the full potential of the software,students need to first improve their overall CI skills to an extent in which the materials can be interpreted finely without an accent.