Chapter 6 Conclusions
6.4 Conclusion
By narrowing the scope of investigation to the intelligibility of foreign-accented English speech, this study is able to identify that professional and trainee interpreters' differ in their perception of foreign-accented English input not in the realm of decoding the deviating phonology, but the mastery of a combination of comprehension skills that can facilitate optimal comprehension of the incoming message to serve as the basis of quality interpreting output. The findings of this research can inform the interpreting training curriculum to better prepare students to work with nonnative speakers, whose presence nowadays is large in conference settings in Taiwan and other parts of the world. In particular, trainings aiming at developing better perception of
foreign-accented input should adopt a holistic approach where conquering the phonological challenge is only part of the process in which all kinds of available comprehension tools must be utilized to reach optimal comprehension. Through formal class exercises, students can also accumulate the confidence in their abilities to conquer
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the foreign accent challenge. All in all, the findings of the current study not only shed light on the understanding of interpreters' processing of foreign-accented speech, but also strike a crucial step in shaping an effective and targeted curriculum on interpreting for foreign-accented speakers.
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Appendix
Appendix i: Speech Materials
Speech 1 Governments Should Promote Happiness
[Part 1]
Thank you all for coming to this lecture. I believe all of you have heard of the idea that “governments should promote happiness”.
The idea that governments should promote happiness is not new at all. In fact, it goes back to the 18th Century. The idea is simply that the best society is the one in which the most people are happy and the fewest number of people are miserable. And that therefore, the job of the government is to make sure that as many people will be happy as possible. This was a very noble view. It continued to influence the thinking of the time throughout most of the 19th Century, and of course it was a great impulse behind many of the social reforms of that period.
But in the 20th Century, people started to question whether you could know what is going on inside anybody other than your own self. Psychologists and economists at that time started to adopt the belief of behaviorism. The economists started to say: if you could not know what was going on inside people, it was ridiculous to suppose that the economy should serve the happiness of the people. Instead, government should serve the means that people might have to be happy - in other words, their
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purchasing power. And so we got to this extraordinary idea that the measure of the welfare of the population was the Gross Domestic Product, the GDP.
Obviously, in very poor countries, extra absolute income is highly conducive to happiness. And when you get to the first world, people care about income just as much as they do in poor countries. So I guess the idea that people's happiness will grow along with the growth of GDP is quite right.
[Part 2]
However, if you look at the measurements we have of happiness in the United States over the last sixty years, there is no upward trend, in spite of big increases in income over that period. The situation is essentially the same for Britain and also for West Germany. So if the economists are right, why do we see this happening?
The answer is that people have their happiness effected by their income due to
comparing it to the income other people earn. So you can imagine, if people are happy according to their income relative to other people, there will always be people who earn more and people who earn less, comparatively.
I think at the current point, the quality of our life has been improved to a level where economic growth can no longer make us a great deal happier. If we want to become happier, we have to pay attention to other factors that influence happiness, which are of course human relationships. For example, how happy we are with our family life, how happy we are with our work life, how happy we are with the community in which we live, and how happy we are with our friends and the strangers we meet in the street.
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If the government does indeed want to promote happiness in the society, it can start from improving the working conditions for workers' today, so that everyone can have a more pleasant working life and have more time at home. They may sacrifice some productivity or some income as a result, but they can earn true happiness in return.
Speech 2 The Psychology of Creativity
[Part 1]
I am going to talk a little bit today about the psychology of creativity, a very
important subject I think, and very neglected by the world in general and by those in my subject, psychologists and psychiatrists.
You hear a lot about the mystery of consciousness and how consciousness is a really a deep and fascinating problem, but you hear much less about the mystery of creativity.
But I think creativity is a much better mystery than consciousness. I suspect that consciousness as a problem will definitely be solved at some point in the future, with the right brain scanning technology. However, what are the chances of ever being able to get a Mozart, stick him in the brain scanner at the moment of inspiration and scan the brain at that moment, and therefore develop the insight into where in the brain creativity comes from?
If we want to study creativity, the first thing we need to know is how to measure creativity. One way I could do it is to measure how many creative works, such as novels and paintings, each of you have produced in the last five years or so. If you have produced 50 paintings in the last year, and someone else only produced two, I could say, you are more creative than the one who just produced two. But is that
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actually a right measure? I mean, you could have produced 50 paintings of garbage, and my two paintings could be wonderful masterpieces. What they do in the creative industry world to solve this problem is to get a panel of experts to judge how creative your works are.
[Part 2]
But we all know that there is a problem. A creative work may be rejected by experts not because it is not creative, but because it is so far ahead of current thinking.
Therefore, the field has now moved in a different direction to measure creativity. It sets you problems that take a creative mind to come to answer. The idea is that this kind of task can probe one of the key constructs in creativity, which is looking at the world in a different way. This is obviously a different way of measuring creativity, but the nice thing about it is there is a correct answer, theoretically, in terms of the problems.
If we all agree that the essence of creativity is being different, then it is reasonable to think that creativity may be linked to mental illness. Because if you look at the world habitually in a different way, you could often end up having your mind pretty
messed-up! There is some support for this argument. For example, there is one study that shows that two-thirds of successful, published writers are actually currently either depressed or have been seriously depressed at some time in their lives.
The fact is, psychologists have not come to a conclusion on whether or not creativity is indeed linked to mental illness. With more research done in this area, we may
eventually prove it wrong. But before the verdict is out, go on and live a creative life without worrying too much about becoming crazy!
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Appendix ii: Normalization Message (Instructions)
You are about to hear two English speeches, each lasting about five minutes.
Please shadow what you hear without changing the words the speaker used.
Please note that for each speech, there will be a change of speaker half-way through.
If you have any question, please raise your hand now and alert the researcher.
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Appendix iii: Practice Speech
Young Carers of Parents with a Mental Illness
It is my great pleasure to share with you my opinions on this very important topic:
how to help young carers of parents with mental illness. I would like to share with you what it is like to be a young carer of parents who are mentally ill and what we can do to help these kids.
If you are a young carer of a parent with a physical illness, you may have a restricted life. You may lose some fun, and you may have a lot of limits on what you can do.
But you would usually expect to get some recognition for what you do. The problem about being a child of a parent with a mental illness is that the caring is much more
But you would usually expect to get some recognition for what you do. The problem about being a child of a parent with a mental illness is that the caring is much more