An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Accent On English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting By Student Interpreters Under Gile’s Cognitive Effort Model

As the global economy and trade continue to develop,English has become a major world language and has developed many regional variants.Indian English is one of the most important regional variants of English and has its own unique characteristics.Indian English is characterized by a heavy accent,a fast pace of speech,a particular rhythm of pauses and a particular way of pronouncing words.For example,one of the main features of Indian English pronunciation is the simplification of the standard English “th” to “t”,which can easily confuse novice interpreters.Interpreters often encounter accents with which they are unfamiliar when interpreting at conferences,and the different accents of English will affect the interpreter’s listening and comprehension ability,creating obstacles to the interpreter’s interpreting process.Based on Gile’s cognitive effort theory,this study is an empirical study to investigate the impact of Indian accent in the source language on the output of student interpreters in the specific cognitive activity of simultaneous interpreting.The study aims to address the following key questions: 1)How does Indian accent affect the performance of student interpreters in simultaneous interpreting? 2)How do interpreters perceive the impact of unfamiliar accents in SI on the quality of their output and performance(perceived difficulty,psychological perception)?In order to answer the above research questions,the author invited 14 MTI interpreting students as experimental subjects,adopted an Indian woman’s TED talk as the raw material and invited a native English speaker to record another excerpt of the same speech.Two English-Chinese simultaneous interpretation tasks(standard accent task and Indian accent task)were played to all student interpreters in succession.At the end of the experiment,the researcher transcribed the interpretation output of all student interpreters into scripts and investigated the multifaceted effects of accent on the interpretation output through quantitative analysis and questionnaires.It is found that the speaker’s accent has an impact on the information realization,speech speed,lexical density and fluency of student interpreters’ interpretation output.The standard accent task has a higher information realization,faster speech speed and higher fluency.The lexical density of Indian accent task is higher than that of standard accent task.In addition,all the 14 student interpreters filled in a questionnaire survey after the experiment.The results of the questionnaire revealed that the task of simultaneous interpreting of Indian accent caused psychological pressure on student interpreters,and most of the student interpreters thought that the task of Indian accent was more difficult than that of standard accent.By analyzing and summarizing the impact of Indian accents on the output of student interpreters,the researcher identifies the causes of the impact of accents on the quality of interpretation and the specific countermeasures to solve the problem,in order to provide a reference model for future solutions.By adopting Gile’s cognitive effort model as a theoretical guide,this study enriches the research dimension of empirical research on simultaneous interpreting by examining the effects of Indian accents on the performance of student interpreters,providing data support for the effects of accents on interpreting performance and offering some guidance to student interpreters in their interpreting practice.