ELICITING GESTALT PERCEPTION OF TELEVISED SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION SPEECH

In Interpreting Studies, results from surveys on quality assessment of interpretation reveal an interrelation among parameters or quality criteria, to the extent that a holistic processing of features was hypothesized, and a holistic perspective to study quality in simultaneous interpretation was suggested. The present study approaches the interpretation assessment from a gestaltic perspective. To this aim: i) a literature review of surveys on interpreting quality was carried out; ii) a corpus of televised simultaneous interpretation was built up; iii) a theoretical paradigm was created and then applied to the construction of a new questionnaire to elicit the gestaltic evaluation of TV broadcast simultaneous interpretation; iv) a pilot survey to test the questionnaire was carried out; and v) a statistical analysis of data from the survey was performed (De Gregoris 2016b). In this paper I will discuss the theoretical paradigm that led me to propose a different questionnaire to assess quality of interpretation from a gestaltic perspective, since the previous studies had adopted an analytic approach. Especially considering the results from the previous studies on interpreting quality, the new perspective led me to: i) adopt of a model of speech perception that did not consider the dichotomies between linguistic/verbal/segmental and paralinguistic/non-verbal/suprasegmental; ii) consider the possible influence of audio-vision and, more specifically, television, in the reception of television interpreting; and iii) take into account the perception of voice, considered its role in audio-vision and television information.