The effect of teaching prosody awareness on interpreting performance: an experimental study of consecutive interpreting from English into Farsi

This study investigates the effect of prosodic feature awareness training on the quality of interpreting by interpreter trainees. Two groups of student interpreters were formed. Participants were assigned to groups at random, but with equal division between genders (seven males in each group). The control group was then taught interpreting skills by the routine curriculum, while the experimental group spent part of the time instead on theoretical explanation and practical exercises emphasizing prosodic differences between Farsi and English. Three raters assessed the quality of the interpreter trainees’ performance in a post-test in terms of accuracy, omissions, overall coherence, grammar, expression, word choice, terminology, accentedness, pace and voice. The results show that prosodic feature awareness training did have a statistically significant effect on the quality measures: the overall assessment of the experimental group was 14 points better (on a scale between 0 and 100) than that of the control group. Moreover, the difference was larger for the phonetic/ prosodic quality scales (accentedness, pace, voice) than for the other scales. These results have implications for designers of curricula for training interpreters, material producers and all who are involved in foreign-language study and pedagogy.