Source language-related erroneous stress placement in the target language output of simultaneous interpreters

Abstract

Erroneous stress placement (ESP) in the target language is one of the salient suprasegmental features of simultaneously interpreted texts. This paper investigates the phenomenon in simultaneous interpretation from English, a free stress language, into Hungarian, a fixed stress language, the aim being to ascertain whether ESPs are related to source language features. Analysis of an experimental corpus collected for an earlier study (Bóna & Bakti 2009) made it possible to identify 122 ESPs, divided into two categories: (a) related to source language features; (b) others. These categories were further divided into several subcategories. Thus, (a) included ESPs related to: (i) source language stress, with semantic correspondence between the source language and target language units concerned; (ii) source language stress, but with no semantic correspondence between the target language unit and the prosodically similar source language unit identified in relatively close proximity to it. For (b), the subcategories distinguished between ESPs related to: (iii) the phonetic target language context; (iv) translation problems; (v) individual speech characteristics. Our results provide support for the view that metrical planning and segmental planning are separate processes. Thus, successful inhibition of source language interference on the segmental level during simultaneous interpreting is not necessarily associated with suppression of suprasegmental level source language interference.

Fluency-related Temporal Features and Syllable Prominence as Prosodic Proficiency Predictors for Learners of English with Different Language Backgrounds

“…Relatively few studies have been done on the production of English stress patterns by speakers of Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish ( Archibald, 1993 ; Bakti & Bóna, 2014 ; Bilá & Zimmermann, 1999 ; Weingartová et al, 2014 ). For Hungarian learners of English, studies have focused only on stress placement, explaining production errors with both fixed word stress and quantity-sensitivity ( Archibald, 1993 ; Bakti & Bóna, 2014 ).…”

“…Relatively few studies have been done on the production of English stress patterns by speakers of Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish ( Archibald, 1993 ; Bakti & Bóna, 2014 ; Bilá & Zimmermann, 1999 ; Weingartová et al, 2014 ). For Hungarian learners of English, studies have focused only on stress placement, explaining production errors with both fixed word stress and quantity-sensitivity ( Archibald, 1993 ; Bakti & Bóna, 2014 ). Archibald (1993) also found some evidence of L1 stress transfer in the speech of Polish learners of English, but a comprehensive study on the production of English stress by Hungarian and Polish speakers is still lacking.…”

Proceedings of DiSS 2019

“…Studies on fluency and pauses in interpreting have mostly focused on the simultaneous mode and include work on pauses (Tissi, 2000) and self-repairs (Petite, 2005). The analysis of error type disfluencies (ETDs) in simultaneously interpreted Hungarian TL texts showed that restarts, grammar errors and false words had the highest proportion in the TL output of interpreters, (Bakti, 2009) and the frequency of ETDs (ETDs/100 words) was between 2.8 and 6.2 in the case of trainee interpreters (Bakti, 2013).…”