Relative contribution of explicit teaching of segmentals vs. prosody to the quality of consecutive interpreting by Farsi-to-English interpreting trainees

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the effect of explicit teaching of segmentals vs. prosody on the quality of interpreting by Farsi-to-English interpreter trainees. Participants were native speakers of Farsi and BA students of English translation and interpreting in Iran, who were assigned to one of three groups. No differences in English language skills were found between the groups prior to the experiment. The control group listened to and discussed English audio and video recordings and did exercises in consecutive interpreting. One experimental group instead spent part of the time on explanation of, and exercises with, English prosody. The second experimental group spent part of the time on explanation of, and exercises with, English segmentals. Total instruction time was 12 hours for each group. The students’ performance in consecutive interpreting was then rated independently by three experts. Results showed that both experimental groups performed better than the control group. Moreover, teaching prosody had a larger positive effect on the overall quality of interpreting from Farsi into English than segmental instruction. We argue that the interpreting curriculum can be strengthened by devoting a small portion of the time to explicit instruction on segmental and (especially) prosodic differences between source and target language.

KEYWORDS:

• Segmentals
• prosody
• interpreter trainees
• curriculum design
• interpretation performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The design of this study is quasi experimental since there is no pretest that has the same structure as the posttest. We assume that three participant groups would have obtained equal scores on a proper pretest, and that, therefore, any differences that may be found in the posttest must be due to the different treatments. We know from earlier research (Yenkmeleki & van Heuven 2017, 2018) that the scores on pretests identical to our posttest correlate with the TOEFL scores of Iranian student-interpreters at r = .940 or better, which means that the TOEFL test almost perfectly predicts the interpreting pretest scores. This strengthens our assumption that the three groups would have obtained equal scores on an interpreting pretest.

2 The Greenhouse-Geiser correction is the most conservative method available when the requirement of sphericity is violated.

3 An (even) better fit was obtained by a quadratic (parabolic) curve but there is no theoretical ground for assuming such a relationship, since there is no reason why posttest interpreting performance should go down for students with very high TOEFL-scores.

4 In Appendices 2, 3 and 4 "I." stands for "Instructor".

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mahmood Yenkimaleki

Mahmood Yenkimaleki (PhD) is a researcher at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and assistant professor of applied linguistics at University of Nahavand, Iran. His area of interest is interpreting studies and applied linguistics. Email: [email protected].

Vincent J. van Heuven

Vincent J. van Heuven (BA, MA, and PhD from Utrecht University) is emeritus professor of Experimental Linguistics and Phonetics and former director of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. He is now a professor at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary. He served on the editorial boards (and as associate editor) of Journal of Phonetics (Academic Press/Elsevier) and Phonetica (Karger) and was editor of the series Speech Research (Mouton de Gruyter). Forty-five doctoral dissertations were written under his (co-)supervision. He is a life member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Email: [email protected].