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Problems in simultaneous interpretation from World Englishes to Korean: Case study on Indian English
The Journal of Translation Studies
Abbr :
JTS
2013, 14(2), pp.253-282
DOI : 10.15749/jts.2013.14.2.009
Publisher : The Korean Association for Translation Studies
Research Area : Interpretation and Translation Studies
2013, 14(2), pp.253-282
DOI : 10.15749/jts.2013.14.2.009
Publisher : The Korean Association for Translation Studies
Research Area : Interpretation and Translation Studies
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This paper looks into problems experienced by English-Korean interpreters as they interpret from World Englishes - in this case Indian English - into Korean. A simultaneous interpretation experiment was conducted on 10 interpreters, followed by retrospective think-aloud procedures. The study aims to identify the segmental and suprasegmental problems Korean interpreters find difficult to solve as they perform simultaneous interpretation. The study results revealed that suprasegmental elements imposed the greatest problems on simultaneous interpretation process. Difficulty in capturing the phonological elements resulted in poor intelligibility, thereby undermining interpreters’ comprehensibility on the source text meaning. Unintelligible suprasegmental elements of Indian English included lexical stress (or pitch stress) in wrong syllables, sentence stress in function words, monotonous intonation, and lack of pauses. The syllable-timed language feature of Indian English put particular difficulty on interpreters’ listening phase. Segmental elements were also found to be contributing to low intelligibility of Indian english, albeit to a lesser degree, compared to suprasegmental elements. Interpreters responded to unintelligible elements by omitting, substituting, summarizing, generalizing ST segments in the production phase, which eventually undermined the fidelity to the source text.
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