Prosodic phenomena in simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

This paper reports on an empirical study on prosody in English-German simultaneous interpreting. It discusses prosody with particular reference to its tonal, durational and dynamic features, such as intonation, pauses, rhythm and accent, as well as its main functions, i.e. structure and prominence. Following a review of previous studies on the topic, a conceptual approach for the analysis of prosody in terms of structure and prominence is developed and subsequently applied to an authentic corpus of professional simultaneous interpretation consisting of three German versions of a 72-minute English source text. Prosodic patterns in the corpus are analyzed by means of a computer-aided method using the software PRAAT. The findings confirm that prosodic features are interdependent and that those in the target texts show certain characteristics that are specific to simultaneous interpreting.