Intelligibility and comprehensibility

According to Smith & Nelson (1985), intelligibility and comprehensibility are independent concepts. This experiment corroborates that statement.

Taking the results from the shadowing and comprehension questions of Text 1, it can be seen that having a higher intelligibility score does not necessarily mean that comprehension will also be higher just like if a lower intelligibility score does not automatically equate to a low comprehension. This would seem to go against Mazzetti's (1999) claim that after a certain intelligibility threshold is crossed, comprehensibility will suffer. However, it might not necessarily be contradictory due to this study’s experimental design and the way the results are calculated. For example, there were a number of Trainee interpreters (most notably T4 and T5), whose intelligibility scores are low (56.23% and 39.08% respectively) but whose comprehension scores are relatively high (3.75/4 and 2/4). This might be because of the way they approached the

simply listening to long passages, sometimes paragraphs of text thereby decreasing their intelligibility scores. Since the cognitive load of Shadowing is no longer an issue for comprehension, they could have potentially understood more information by simply listening to the text attentively and thus answered more questions correctly in comparison to participants who did not stop to listen.

The relative independence of intelligibility and comprehensibility can also be approached from the difficulty ratings and the comments made by the participants in the retrospective interview.

One of the first clues that point to intelligibility and comprehensibility being independent is that only one of the participants rated them as equally difficult, some finding recognising the individual words easier, and some found understanding the message easier. This is confirmed in their comments:

T8: There were some passages in which I could easily recognise the words but I didn’t know what he meant. “Patient Zero” I know these words but I don’t know what they mean in that sentence.

P4: Listening and recognising every word is hard so I tried to remind myself not to get hogged down by the individual words and just focus on listening to the overall message.

This combination of data also shows that perceived intelligibility and actual intelligibility and comprehension do not necessarily line up, for instance, subject T1 rated the accent as hard (6/7) in terms of both intelligibility and comprehension, but T1’s intelligibility performance was among the best (90,88% of words correctly shadowed). On the other hand, T5 claimed that Text 2 had been very easy to

comprehend (1/7), but has the second lowest score in both answering the

comprehension questions (1.25/4) and correctly interpreting the text’s main ideas (51.92%).

5.1.3.1 Factors that affect intelligibility and comprehensibility of accent

As discussed in the literature review, there are several factors that influence whether speech is intelligible or comprehensible to a listener, including familiarity with the topic, familiarity with the speaker’s accent, knowledge of the speaker’s native language and interest in the talk (Smith & Nelson, 1985). Analysing these variables is beyond the scope of this study, but it is worthwhile to note that the participants often mentioned these four aspects.

For some of the participants, being familiar with the topic was crucial to disambiguate unintelligible words or comprehend the text whereas some quoted unfamiliarity with the topics as an added obstacle for comprehension.

T3: For accented speakers, familiarising yourself with the topic is very helpful.

P2: I have translated things related to the light colours before so although I didn’t know what the speaker was saying, I still could understand that passage.

T8: I’m not familiar with the topic so when I knew it was going to be about the fashion industry I had no idea what he was going to talk about. I know more about astronomy so it was easier to understand.

One’s attitude towards the task also played a role, whether they wanted or were interested by the topic, for instance.

T5: I liked the second speech more. I found the first one very boring so I guess that’s another factor that made understanding it harder.

P4: I am not that interested in the fashion industry so it was more difficult.

Although none of the participants spoke Slovak (the mother tongue of the speaker), and thus, there is no way of discerning whether knowing the speaker’s

language plays a big role or not, many participants mentioned previous experiences that they had had while interpreting for non-native speakers whose native languages they could speak during the retrospective interview. For those who mentioned it, it does seem that knowledge of the speakers L1 makes understanding the message easier. These are some excerpts from T8 who can speak French, P2 who knows Spanish and Dutch and P5 who can speak Japanese.

T8: We did a French speaker in class one time. [Knowing some French] helped a little.

P2: I think when you know the speakers native language you can at least make more sense of their pronunciation or way of expressing themselves because you can use the pronunciation and grammar of that language and apply it to English.

P5: Knowing Japanese is helpful when listening to Japanese speakers, especially when they pronounce English words in a Japanese way, it is much easier to recognise them.

However, the one factor that was considered to have the biggest impact on foreign accent comprehension and intelligibility by almost every participant was familiarity with the speaker’s accent. The participants expressed that the more familiar one is with

the speaker’s accent, the easier it is to understand. Some raised examples from previous experiences working for non-native speakers of English which resulted in a higher familiarity and thus higher intelligibility of that accent.

P2: I worked for an group from India for a couple of months, and after a while I could figure out the way their accent works and could understand them better the more time I spoke with them

P3: I interpreted for a French speaker several times; at the beginning I had some trouble figuring out the different words and pronunciation but after translating for him several times I got used to the accent and had no problems.

Some of the interpreters also mentioned the importance of becoming more familiar with the accent of the speaker if they knew they were going to be listening to a non-native speaker, and used a wide variety of techniques.

P3: After listening to a person’s speech, you end up getting used to it, so if you are in the booth, you can let your partner do the first part while you listen to the speaker’s accent.

P1: I can go on YouTube and find videos of the speaker so I can get acquainted with their accent.

P4: Sometimes to familiarize myself with the accent, if there are no videos

available, I’ll go on Google Translate and type in a passage for Google to read it back to me using the, say, Japanese voice settings. It’s not exactly the same but it’s useful to train yourself and understand the speaker better.

Analyzing whether the factors mentioned above did or did not play a role in this experiment would be beyond the scope of this study. However, it is nevertheless worthwhile to take into consideration what interpreters deem to be different factors can play a role to be analyzed in further research.