Towards to the Anticipation in Simultaneous Interpreting (original) (raw)
Related papers
Prosodic features of simultaneous interpreting
In Mertens, P. & A.C. Simon (eds), Proceedings of the Prosody-Discourse Interface Conference 2013 (IDP-2013), pp. 33-37, available from: http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/franitalco/idp2013/Proceedings.html, 2013
We study the prosodic features of simultaneous conference interpreting in an attempt to describe its particular speaking style. We focus on the temporal organisation of the interpreters’ speech (pauses, speech rate), as well as global prosodic properties (f0 range, melodic agitation). We also study similarity and convergence phenomena between the speaker and the interpreter, on prosodic features, and their dynamic evolution over time. The findings indicate that interpreters make longer silent pauses, less frequently than speakers and their speech rate is more variable. In most cases, interpreters had a narrower pitch range than speakers and do not mirror the pitch of their speakers.
The importance of prosodic elements in simultaneous interpreting
2018
Prosody is one of the most important features of any speech and, therefore, of the interpretation of speeches. However, very little literature has been dedicated to the research of this field. This research project aims at analysing and defining the real importance of prosody in simultaneous interpreting and, more specifically, that of other elements belonging to the global section of prosody: voice, rhythm, enunciation, intonation, breathing and pauses, punctuation and fillers. Owing to it being a scantly explored field, the project starts by defining criteria to explain the importance of these prosodic elements in simultaneous interpreting. It then goes on to analyse some interpretations (carried out by fourth-year undergraduate students), which resulted in very different outcomes, each characterized by the use of voice and each student’s awareness regarding prosody. Such analysis demonstrates that extralinguistic factors are as important as linguistic elements, as well as how muc...
Inference and Anticipation in Simultaneous Interpreting: A probability-prediction model
2004
After introducing his own phonetic theory, natural phonetics, Canepari provides the necessary extension of the International Phonetic Alphabet, paying particular attention to tones and intonation, which are often not included among the phonetic symbols. He also addresses the importance of having a more finegrained classification of sounds. The book is divided into fourteen chapters, followed by a 'Useful bibliography', in which C mentions only the books he considers relevant for further research. After a preface, where C lists the contents of the book and makes some observations on the terminology that will be used as compared to the traditional phonetic terminology, Ch. 2 offers a guide to the figures that are often used in the book and a guide to different types of transcriptions. Ch. 3 is an introduction to phonetic science, and Ch. 4 offers an overview of the articulatory apparatus. Ch. 5 addresses the problem of the classification of sounds according to articulatory criteria. Ch. 6 introduces the main classes of sounds, utilizing the concepts of stress, tones, and intonation. Ch. 7 discusses the validity of the IPA and underlines its flaws. In this chapter, C presents his own phonetic alphabet, the can IPA, which is much richer and more detailed than the off IPA, the official IPA. In Ch. 8 vowels and vocoids are considered and the issue of the mono-or bi-phonemic nature of diphthongs is debated. Chs. 9 and 10 are dedicated to consonants and contoids, while Ch. 11 is dedicated to other phonetic phenomena, such as nasalization, devoicing, coarticulation, and modification. Ch. 12 is dedicated to what C calls microstructures, that is, to syllables. First, a definition of syllables is provided, and then syllables are situated in the speech chain. Syllable length and stress are also an issue in this chapter. Ch. 13 represents a true innovation with respect to other phonetic manuals, as it addresses so-called macrostructures, that is, all of those suprasegmental elements that are not usually represented in the IPA. This chapter examines rhythm and pauses, pitch and intonation. It defines the phonetic category of intonemes, which define intonational contrasts in language. Ch. 14 offers an overview of paraphonics, and Ch. 15 introduces C's phonetic classification of the world's languages. Ch. 16 is dedicated to the languages and dialects of Italy, Ch. 17 to the languages spoken in Europe, Ch. 18 to African languages, Ch. 19 to Asian languages, Ch. 20 to Australian languages, and Ch. 21 to American languages. Interestingly, a chapter is also devoted to the reconstruction of the sounds of dead languages, based on comparative records between languages that are alive today and on the reflexes that these dead languages have in loanwords. The last chapter is dedicated to 'extraterrestrial'. A detailed index and a language index close this valuable volume. [ROBERTA D'ALESSAN-DRO, University of Cambridge.
The Impact of Simultaneous Interpreting Prosody on Speech Perception: Proposal for an Experiment.
Emerging Research in Translation Studies: Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Summer School 2012, 2014
"Prosody in simultaneous interpreting (SI) depends on duration, acoustic intensity and fundamental frequency (Ahrens 2005). Most perceptive studies of SI prosody have consisted in manipulating isolated prosodic features and observing their impact on the listeners’ perception (e.g., Collados Aís 2002/1998; Rennert 2010). One exception is Shlesinger’s study (1994) of the natural prosodic features of SI and their perceptive impact. Shlesinger contributed to defining the distinguishing prosody of SI. Moreover, she observed that unmanipulated SI prosody could deteriorate the listeners’ understanding of the speech content. This paper follows up on Shlesinger’s study (1994) and introduces a proposal for a larger scale study of the nature and perceptive impact of SI prosody. Our framework entails the descriptive and perceptive aspects of prosody after Ahrens (2005) and Götz (2013). We formulate two main hypotheses about SI prosodic features: (1) they are less numerous in shadowed and read-aloud speech than in interpreted speech; (2) they deteriorate the listeners’ understanding and rating of the interpreter’s performance. We propose to measure the perceptive impact of SI prosody with a questionnaire (see, e.g., Reithofer 2011)."
Anticipation in simultaneous interpreting
B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & M. Thelen (ed.) Translation and Meaning Part 8, Zuyd University, Maastricht, 2008
This paper examines a well-known phenomenon which has always aroused not only extensive scholarly interest, but also numerous controversies. Firstly, we discuss how anticipation has been understood and defined by various researchers. Secondly, we present diverse research methods used to investigate anticipation and examples of studies employing these methods. Finally, we focus on our own research project aimed at identifying strategies used by simultaneous interpreters working from English into Polish and from Polish into English. The project involved both product-oriented and process-oriented methods in order to gain insight into two types of anticipation. The questions raised in this part of the paper include the frequency of anticipation in the language combinations under investigation, its effectiveness as well as the influence that may be exerted by directionality.
Prosodic correlates of perceived quality and fluency in simultaneous interpreting
Proceedings of the 7th Speech Prosody Conference
This study explores the relationship between prosodic features specific to simultaneous interpreting and listeners’ perception of the fluency and accuracy of interpreting, as well as their comprehension of the source speech. Two groups of participants (47 subject experts and 40 non-experts) listened to a 20-minute lecture in German, along with its interpretation into French under two conditions (the actual interpretation, or a read-aloud rendition of the same text by the same interpreter) and answered comprehension and rating questions. The prosodic features of the two conditions were analysed, confirming differences regarding the temporal organisation of speech, disfluencies, pitch register and the interface between prosody and syntax. Our results suggest that interpreting- specific prosodic features affect the perception of fluency, which in turn affects the perception of accuracy; however the impact on listeners who enjoy relevant contextual knowledge is less pronounced.
Brain Research, 2011
An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate the role of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary as well as their interaction in spoken discourse comprehension. Chinese question-answer dialogues were used as stimuli. The answer sentence is a syntactically ambiguous phrase, with a prosodic phrase boundary at the immediate left side of the critical word in the carrier sentence. Meanwhile, the critical word was accented. We manipulated the question context while keeping the speech signal of the answer sentence constant, which gives rise to congruent and in-congruent questionanswer pairs with violations of prosodic prominence, prosodic boundary, or both. Results showed that prosodic prominence violation evoked a frontal-central negative effect (270-510 ms), while prosodic boundary violation elicited a broadly distributed negative effect (270-510 ms and 510-660 ms). The effect of combined prominence-boundary violation was similar to that of the single prosodic prominence violation. Furthermore, there was an interaction between the effect of prosodic prominence violation and the effect of prosodic boundary violation in the window latency of 270-510 ms, which suggests an immediate interaction between the semantic processing of prosodic prominence and the syntactic processing of prosodic boundary during spoken language comprehension. In addition, a detailed analysis of the obtained negativity effects showed that the size of the negative effect to the prosodic boundary violation was increased by an additional prosodic prominence violation, but the size of the negative effect to the prosodic prominence violation was not affected by an additional prosodic boundary violation, which suggests an asymmetry between the effects of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary.
SUMMARY Classical models of speech recognition assume that a de- tailed, short-term analysis of the acoustic signal is essential for accurately decoding the speech signal and that this decoding process is rooted in the phonetic segment. This paper presents an alternative view, one in which the time scales required to accurately describe and model spoken language are both shorter and longer than the phonetic segment, and are inherently wedded to the syllable. The syllable reflects a singular property of the acoustic signal — the modulation spectrum — which provides a princi- pled, quantitative framework to describe the process by which the listener proceeds from sound to meaning. The ability to understand spoken lan- guage (i.e., intelligibility) vitally depends on the integrity of the modula- tion spectrum within the core range of the syllable (3-10Hz) and reflects the variation in syllable emphasis associated with the concept of prosodic prominence ("accent"). A model of ...
Whence and whither prosody in automatic speech understanding: a case study
2001
The 'case' this paper is dealing with is prosody research at the Chair for Pattern Recognition at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg during the last fifteen years. We want to show how this mirrors the development of prosody research within automatic speech understanding in general. We sketch the realm of prosody in automatic speech understanding and relate the projects conducted to the research topics. This is illustrated in more detail with experimental results obtained within the last two years. Emphasis is put on the interplay between prosodic information and other knowledge sources. 2. The Interplay between Research and Projects Researchers help defining the goals of projects and projects define the work that has to be done by the researchers. New projects have to introduce new features in order to be attractive enough. Since the mid eighties, our institute was closely connected to or active in prosody research within the following projects; for each project, duration, scenario, speech material, and main topics are given: DFG-project Ý 'modus-focus-intonation' (in Munich), 1984-1989: elicited speech, prosodic marking of accents and sentence modalitȳ DFG-project 'intonation-register-modus-focus' (in Munich), 1989-1992: spontaneous speech ('blocks world'), prosodic marking of accents and sentence modality in spontaneous vs. read speech Ý DFG is the German Research Council; such grants are given to basic research projects. All the other projects listed in this section were funded by the German Ministry of Education, Science, Research, and Technology (BMBF).