The Impact Of Italian Accent On Student Interpreter Performance In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting From The Perspective Of Gile’s Effort Model

Accented English material has long been a headache for student interpreters.Italian accent,as a typical example,has its own unique pronunciation characteristics and has rarely been studied independently before.Therefore,based on Daniel Gile’s Effort Model,this thesis aims to study the impacts of the Italian accent on student interpreters’ E-C CI performance.The author uses the methodology of control experiment to compare the CI performance of student interpreters in standard American-accent and Italian-accent English source languages.The experimental variables include theme,speech speed,sentence length,background sound,which are properly controlled,with accent as the sole output dependent variable.The overall performance of the student interpreters are analyzed through notes,transcriptions and interviews.Besides,interviews are conducted immediately after the interpretation to support the experiment.This research shows that English source language with Italian accent does have negative impacts on student interpreter performance,and they are mainly demonstrated in accuracy rate,fluency,word use and strategy use.Potential reasons include cognitive overload on students’ listening and analysis,note-taking,short-term memory and information output,etc.