Background of the study

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background of the study

According to David Crystal's estimates in 2008, the total number of English speakers in the world has reached around two billion (Crystal, 2008). Nevertheless, "

it will be those who speak English as a second or foreign language who will determine its world future" (Graddol, 1997, p. 5). This is because the number of nonnative speakers substantially outnumbers that of native speakers by a factor of three or four (Graddol 1999, as cited in Crystal, 2008). English is now not only an official language in more than seventy countries but also the most widely taught foreign language in over 100 countries (Crystal, 1997). Therefore, in an increasing number of occasions in the international arena, one can clearly observe the growing momentum and participation of nonnative English speakers in using and shaping the development of the English language. The unprecedented spread of this language among people of different first language backgrounds also gives birth to various terms that describe this special status of English, such as "English as an international language" (EIL) (e.g. Jenkins, 2002),

"English as a global language" (e.g. Crystal, 1997), or "English as a Lingua Franca"

(e.g. Jenkins, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2004).

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English as a Lingua Franca is a term that refers to the use of English as a common medium of communication between nonnative-speaking users. In this context, the majority of speakers speak with a nonnative English accent (Seidlhofer, 2004). According to Wells (1982), accent is a phonological phenomenon. It describes a person's systematic realizations of the segmental and prosodic properties of a language. As Smith, Bradlow, and Bent (2003) have pointed out, when someone speaks a language as a second-language (L2), phonological transfers from his first-language (L1) or phoneme patterns unique to the L2 could give rise to the presence of a foreign-accent. As the use of English spreads, and the legitimacy of different nonnative varieties being recognized, native and nonnative speakers of English alike need to face the increasing challenge of decoding spoken English flavored with unfamiliar accents. As a result, the intelligibility of different varieties of English as spoken and perceived by interlocutors of different first-language (L1) backgrounds has become one of the central issues in ELF-related research. Intelligibility, as defined by Smith and Nelson (1985), is a listener's word/utterance recognition, or the decoding of the phonological input of a piece of message.

In the context of ELF, some researchers were interested in whether there are certain spoken varieties of English that are the most intelligible to speakers across

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different language backgrounds, and that these varieties may have the potential value to replace the native speaker norm to become new phonology norm for an international English that can be used by people from different language backgrounds. Jenkins (2002), for instance, went so far to create a phonological Lingua Franca Core (LFC), which is a core set of English phonology that are judged to be crucial to the mutual intelligibility of speakers of different accents.

Nevertheless, the attempt to identify specific varieties of spoken English as being the 'new norm' or having the best 'mutual intelligibility' across speakers of different L1 has never succeeded. The fact is, evidence shows that native and nonnative speakers of English seem to possess different phonological representations and thus have different intelligibility towards a same string of auditory input (e.g. Bent & Bradlow, 2003;

Major, Fitzmaurice, Bunta, & Balasubramanian, 2002). This difference in

phonological representation of English may even exist between speakers of different L1. Therefore, it is very doubtful if this 'new norm' approach in English phonology will ever succeed. Therefore, users of English will continue to face the decoding challenge in a world where so many different English phonological systems are spoken.

For conference interpreters, this is also an issue of dear concern (Chang & Wu, 2012). Conference interpreters are a group of very special listeners. In normal

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communication settings, a listener can usually ask for clarification from the speaker if intelligibility or comprehension of the input failed. Nevertheless, if the intelligibility of a nonnative English input is too low, a conference interpreter would have no chance to repair the communication breakdowns by asking for clarifications. If one is working in simultaneous mode, the physical isolation of the booth prevents the interpreter from asking for more information. Even when working consecutively, the precious conference time and the ideal flow of the event do not allow constant clarifications, either. Therefore, conference interpreters need to resort to other

remedies to compensate the impaired communication, such as visual aids or resorting to contextual or world knowledge to assist comprehension.

The impact of ELF in international conferences has been felt by interpreters all over the world. In Donovan (2009), 'English plus another language' has been

identified as the most common language combination by half of the fifty interpreters Donovan surveyed. In Europe and Taiwan, surveys of conference interpreters, albeit small in scale, revealed that most interpreters have now come to regard nonnative English speakers as a normal part of their profession (e.g. Albl-Mikasa, 2010; Chang

& Wu, 2012). Furthermore, unfamiliar or non-standard accents has long been

recognized as an interfering variable to interpreters' performances. For instance, in the

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AIIC workload survey conducted in 2002 (AIIC, 2002), unfamiliar accent has been quoted as one of the top stressors for interpreters . It is also suggested in Daniel Gile’s Effort Models that interpreters will need to devote more processing capacity to

listening and comprehension when the speech input is heavily accented (Gile, 2009).Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of the impact of nonnative accents on interpreting performances is needed to inform the curriculum and prepare the next generation of interpreters to deal with this challenge.

Nevertheless, to date, only a handful of empirical studies have been attempted to investigate into this issue. For instance, Kurz (2008), Lin (2011) and Mazzetti (1999) have investigated the impact of foreign-accented speech on the accuracy of interpreting output or the percentage of correctly-interpreted proposition. Although all three of them concluded that unfamiliar accent does have a negative impact on interpreting output, their conclusions were confounded with variables other than the unfamiliar phonology, and suffered from some methodological pitfalls. Furthermore, there is only one existing study attempting to explore professional interpreters' experiences in coping with the nonstandard English speaker challenge (i.e. Chang & Wu, 2012), which is the type of information that can inform training designs to transform novice into an expert (Schraagen, 2009). All in all, the field of interpreting today is in urgent

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need of scientific investigations that can identify effective coping strategies to the impact of unfamiliar accents by learning from expert practitioners. With this study, the researcher hopes to advance the understanding in interpreters' decoding and

processing of foreign-accented English input, and identify professional-trainee differences in the process to inform interpreting pedagogy.