Text-related Factors of Difficulty

The text-related factor of difficulty investigated in this study was FSR. However, it was revealed that FSR for CI and SI occasions may not be based on exactly the same standard. In addition, there are other factors that come into play in influencing a speech material’s difficulty.

5.4.1 FSR for CI versus SI

The SR set as the FSR in this study is 164 wpm, which falls into the category of a

“difficult” SR in Setton and Dawrant (2016b, p. 52). According to Setton and Dawrant, a “difficult” SR is one that professional interpreters would find difficult, and would have to omit and summarize messages in order to keep up. Yet, Setton and Dawrant implied that this standard is more applicable to SI.

Based on the results of the proposition rendition in this study, it is evident that the student interpreters rendered fewer messages in the scoring units in the FSR setting.

However, in the retrospective interview, a number of student interpreters believed that

despite the fact that they missed more details due to FSR, they got the main ideas right.

When they were asked to assess the difficulty level brought by SR alone in the FSR setting, the average was only 3.425 out of 5. This seems to correspond to the description of the interpreter encountering a “challenging” speed, according to Setton and Dawrant (2016b, p. 52), which is having to compress the messages but still render an (almost) complete TL output, while finding the SR taxing. This shows that for the CI source speech in this study, 164 wpm was perhaps not “difficult,” but “challenging” to the student interpreters, or at least for the Y2 student interpreters, who scored somewhat higher (61.9/100) in the FSR setting compared with Y1 student interpreters (54.25/100).

In fact, a number of student interpreters said that they did not think the two

speeches (134.5/164 wpm) varied significantly in SR. This suggests that a speech that is too fast for the interpreter doing SI may not be so in CI, possibly because note

production allows more flexibility compared with speech production in SI as suggested by Gile (2009). Another reason may be that the strategy to “not write down things that I understood, such as narratives” (B10) in the first phase of CI is not applicable to the TL production in SI. In all, a certain SR in a CI occasion and an SI occasion may not be at the same level of difficulty to interpreters. However, there is currently little evidence that this is true. More research is needed on this matter. For instance, experiments comparing performance in CI and SI settings may be able to shed light on this matter.

5.4.2 Difficulty parameters besides FSR

The difficulty caused by FSR should be gauged alongside other factors. There are

Feal, as cited in Pöchhacker, 2016). Furthermore, there are more factors that could affect the difficulty level on top of FSR. According to the Speech Difficulty Index proposed by Setton and Dawrant (2016b, p. 51), apart from “speed of delivery,”

“subject matter,” “density and style,” and “accent and prosody” are three other parameters that can determine the difficulty level of a speech. It is, therefore, very

difficult to pinpoint a number of FSR that applies to every speech occasion (Pöchhacker, 2016).

It is possible that the FSR speech in this study is not considered very fast by the participants because its overall speech difficulty level is not high. This shows that more assessments are needed in addition to the difficulty assessment tests performed in this study. The tests did not reflect the overall difficulty level of the speeches, because most of them only take parameters such as syllables, words, propositions, or sentence length into account, without considering other factors that may affect the overall difficulty level. For instance, the result of a fairly difficult level from the Flesche-Kincaid readability test (see p. 44) represents the difficulty level of style at best, since the test does not assess other parameters.

Indeed, some participants of the study found it hard to consider the factor of SR alone when they were asked to decide the difficulty level from one to five based on SR alone in the retrospective interview. One student interpreter (A7) mentioned that “in addition to the difficulty brought by FSR, I felt that the speech contained more information and less narration than the slower speech,” which contributed to the increase of the difficulty level she perceived. Setton and Dawrant also stated that when

successive sentences all contain new information, the density level becomes higher.

Considering the fact that there are not that many “names, terms, numbers, and detailed specific information” in the speeches, nor does “every sentence contain new

information,” we may assume that the density level of the speech materials is not that high (Setton & Dawrant, 2016b, p. 53). Therefore, it is possible that the density level of the speech materials in this study is low, offsetting the difficulty level brought by FSR.

The subject matter and the accent and prosody may also have contributed an overall medium-level difficulty perception among the participants. The speech materials probably fall under a “moderate” to “professional” level of subject matter difficulty, considering the fact that not much specialized terminology is used. Lastly, since the speaker used a “standard mainstream [General American] accent” and articulated very clearly, the difficulty level brought by accent and prosody is seemingly low, too.

The fact that many participants perceived the FSR in this study as only challenging instead of difficult seem to echo Setton and Dawrant’s argument that all four parameters interact with each other (2016b). While it seems reasonable to isolate FSR as the only contributing factor to a change in accuracy or note-taking preferences in a study about the impact of FSR, one should not neglect the fact that the difficulty level of FSR will inevitably be affected by other parameters. Therefore, in designing speech materials, the difficulty level of subject matter, density, and accent and prosody should be considered alongside SR.