Predictors of ear-voice span, a corpus-based study with special reference to sex

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a study on Ear-Voice Span (EVS) carried out on corpus data drawn from the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus Ghent, where sex is included as a predictor alongside several other variables. Ear-Voice Span is considered to be an indicator of cognitive processes in simultaneous interpreting and has therefore been selected to determine whether potential cognitive sex differences trigger different EVS patterns in men and women. Differences between men and women are reported in individual studies for tasks that are crucial to interpreting. However, meta-analyses tend to show that the reported cognitive differences between the sexes are exaggerated. This study uses corpus-based research methods to analyse the EVS of male and female interpreters in the European Parliament against the background of other known predictors of EVS. The data sample consists of 180 source texts and interpretations in six language pairs. The hypothesis was not confirmed as no sex differences were found. This research project helped identify relevant predictors of EVS: delivery rate, languages and interpreter’s disfluencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Simultaneous interpreting
• ear-voice span
• corpus
• sex differences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Camille Collard is a Ph.D student at the Ghent University’s EQTIS research group. She graduated as a conference interpreter in 2014 and is conducting corpus-based research on cognitive sex differences in simultaneous interpreting, focusing on Ear-Voice-Span and disfluencies.

Bart Defrancq is an Associate Professor of interpreting and legal translation at Ghent University, and member of the EQTIS research group. He has been and still is involved in several corpus compilation projects, including the compilation of interpreting corpora for simultaneous and dialogue interpreting. He has published widely on contrastive linguistics, translation and interpreting.

ORCID

Camille Collard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1938-3828

Notes

1. For the purpose of this paper, differences between males and females will be described as sex differences. While the expression ‘gender differences’ is commonly used, it generally refers to an individual’s self-conception and role within society. In fact gender differences studies tend to focus on communicative and linguistic differences (Chambers & Trudgill, 1998; Coates, 1993). The present study however focuses on the cognitive aspects and therefore, as for most studies described here, only takes the subjects’ biological sex into account and makes no assumptions on their gender.

2. According to the estimations of the Organisation Intersex International Europe, there is a probability that one percent of the interpreters in the corpus are intersex. Unfortunately there is no possibility of knowing whether interpreters in the corpus are intersex. While the authors are conscious of this possibility, they consider that the size of the corpus means that this low probability does not obviate much of the discussion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Ghent’s Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds (Special Research Fund).