Are interpreters better respeakers?

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examined whether interpreters and interpreting trainees are better predisposed to respeaking than people with no interpreting skills. We tested 57 participants (22 interpreters, 23 translators and 12 controls) while respeaking 5-minute videos with two parameters: speech rate (fast/slow) and number of speakers (one/many). Having measured the quality of the respeaking performance using two independent methods: the NER model and rating, we found that interpreters consistently achieved higher scores than the other two groups. The findings are discussed in the context of transfer of skills, expert performance and respeaking training.

KEYWORDS:

• Respeaking
• interpreting
• live subtitling
• competence; NER
• audiovisual translation

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science Centre Poland under Grant DEC-2013/11/B/HS2/02762.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term ‘one-speaker’ refers to the number of people talking at the same time. Therefore, while there were many speakers in the news programme, none of them spoke simultaneously with others, so there was no overlapping speech.

2. Results of these are reported elsewhere.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre Poland (PL) [DEC-2013/11/B/HS2/02762].