Rhythm and intonation in consecutive interpreting

Abstract EN

Consecutive interpreting is a very complex activity and a form of oral communication on which there are still not enough studies.

Three female students in the interpretation-post-graduate course were asked to do the consecutive interpretation from Arabic to Italian and viceversa.

This is to collect more data about the argument and to explore the influence of the task on the prosody of consecutive interpreting as well as to verify the transfer hypothesis.

Analysis of rhythmic features show that the output in the first language show higher fluency, speech rate, articulation rate, less pauses (filled and unfilled).

Nevertheless, interpreting in L2 is not rhythmically confused.

Instead, it shows, to some extent, regularities in the positioning of pauses and their durations, related to syntactic structure.

Terminal contours of Intonation differ in both languages, but the suspensive contour is the most common.

There is no evidence in the data on the prosodic transfer from L1.