The story of the tortoise and the hare – Speech rate in simultaneous interpretation and its influence on the quality of trainee-interpreters performance

Abstract: This paper analyzes speech rate of the source text (ST) speaker and its implications on the rendition of the target text (TT) done by trainee-interpreters. Various studies (Gerver 1969, Pio 2003, Vik-Touvinen 2002) have shown that an increase in the presentation rate has an effect on the quality of the rendered text. The study was conducted on a corpus that comprised the recordings of simultaneous interpretation from English into Croatian (mother tongue). The paper will first look into the different ways of calculating speech rate, apply the optimal calculation on the ST, categorize the analyzed speeches, and finally, qualitatively verify the success of rendered texts. Most of the null hypotheses start from the point that the higher the speech rate the less successful the rendition of the target text will be. Nonetheless, the results of this study do not confirm these expectations.