The effect of prosody awareness training on the performance of consecutive interpretation by Farsi-English interpreter trainees: an experimental study

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of prosody awareness training on the performance of Farsi-English interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were formed. All were native speakers of Farsi who studied English translation and interpreting at the BA level at the State University of Arak, Iran. Participants were assigned to groups at random, but with equal division between genders (8 female and 8 male students in each group). At the beginning of the program, all the participants took a pretest of general English proficiency. No significant differences in English language skills (TOEFL scores) could be established between the groups. Three expert raters assessed quality measures of interpreting performance in both a pretest and a post-test. All rating scales that pertain to prosodic aspects in the trainees' interpreting performance, proved susceptible to the explicit teaching of prosody. The results of the study showed that explicit teaching of prosody statistically did have a positive effect on the overall interpreting performance by Farsi-English interpreter trainees. The pedagogical implications of the present study would pertain to interpreting programs all over the world. Course developers should take these results into considerations and include contrastive prosody in the textbooks for interpreting programs.

The effect of teaching prosody awareness on interpreting performance: an experimental study of consecutive interpreting from English into Farsi

“…We recently showed that our prosody training program was successful in boosting the quality of the speech output in so-called inverse consecutive interpreting, i.e. from native Farsi into non-native English (Yenkimaleki, 2017;Yenkimaleki & van Heuven, 2016c). In inverse interpreting, of course, the increased awareness of the prosodic requirements of English is directly observable in the output of the interpreting process.…”

Effects of prosody awareness training on the intelligibility of Iranian interpreter trainees in English

“…Improved sentence prosody will make the interpreter's output more comprehensible, while improved word prosody will yield better intelligibility, i.e., the words spoken by the interpreter will be recognized more easily. In the earlier experiment (Yenkimaleki & Van Heuven, 2016d) we showed that our prosody awareness training yielded a small (and marginally significant) improvement in comprehensibility, together with a large increase in the judged quality of the pronunciation. The present experiment provides the additional insight that the prosody training increases the intelligibility of the Iranian learners of English.…”

Prosody Instruction for Interpreter Trainees: Does Methodology Make a Difference? An Experimental Study

“…Research shows that correct prosody (intonation, rhythm and stress) is important for successful EFL (English as a Foreign Language) pronunciation (Gut and Pillai 2014;Kang 2010;Xue and Lee 2014;Pickering 2004;Yoon 2014;Yenkimaleki and Van Heuven 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d. Gut and Pillai (2014) predict that second language learners will face problems in producing prosodic focus marking when their first language is different from the second language in the way it signals focus.…”

“…A number of scholars paid attention to this issue in EFL contexts by investigating the explicit teaching of phonological rules (e.g. Murakawa 1981;de Bot and Mailfert 1982;Leather 1990;Champagne-Muzar, Schneiderman and Bourdages 1993;Pennington 1998;Ahrens 2004;Derwing and Munro 2005;Venkatagiri and Levis 2007;Foote, Holtby and Derwing 2011;Derwing, Diepenbroek and Foote 2012;Robinson et al 2012;Yenkimaleki and Van Heuven 2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d, 2017Suwartono 2014;Koike 2014;Yenkimaleki 2016Yenkimaleki , 2017. Some studies report a positive effect of implicit teaching of pronunciation rules.…”