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The impact of simultaneous-interpreting prosody on comprehension


 Does the particular prosody of simultaneous interpreting have an impact on comprehensibility? This paper presents
 an experiment that sought to answer this question. Two groups of listeners (47 with relevant contextual knowledge about the
 subject-matter of the speech and 40 with less contextual knowledge) listened to the interpretation into French of a 20-minute
 lecture in German under two conditions (the actual interpretation and a read-aloud rendition of the transcript of the
 interpretation by the same interpreter) and answered comprehension questions. The prosodic features of the two conditions were
 analysed, and differences regarding the temporal organisation of speech, disfluencies, pitch register and the interface between
 prosody and syntax emerged. Simultaneous interpreting was found to be more monotonous, to contain a larger number of short and
 long silent pauses, more hesitations (“euh”) and more non-syntactic pauses as well as to have a more irregular speech rate. The
 read-aloud version was livelier, with more medium-length silent pauses and almost no hesitation. Results of the comprehension
 questionnaire do not demonstrate that interpreting-specific prosodic features affect comprehensibility to a significant extent.
 This is consistent with professional norms of interpreting in specialised conferences, where verbal aspects have priority over
 non-verbal ones.