The Effect of Speaker's Gestures on the EVS of English into Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting

[[abstract]]Many studies have looked into the effects of visual input from the speaker (VIS) on simultaneous interpreting (SI) and no coherent conclusions could be drawn. This may be due to the variability of VIS in different contexts. This study narrows down the scope of VIS into only one kind of gesture, intrinsic kinetograph, based on Ekman and Friesen's (1969) definition and hypothesizes, using Gile's Effort Model (1995) and relevant literature, that this type of gesture, when matching English verbs, can help shorten the Ear-Voice Span (EVS) in SI. An experiment was conducted on 20 professional interpreters separately and questionnaires were filled out after the experiment. The results suggested that: 1) speech content types (general or specific topic) did not affect the EVS significantly; 2) seeing intrinsic kinetographs in the first half of the speech did not affect the EVS in the second half significantly; 3) the influence of intrinsic kinetographs on EVS was not statistically significant in either a general topic or a specific topic; 4) genders and years of interpreting experience did not affect the EVS significantly. However, open-ended responses in the questionnaire seem to suggest that the benefits of intrinsic kinetographs are contingent on the Coordination Effort. Besides, eleven out of fifteen subjects (73%) who saw intrinsic kinetographs in the experiment rated the gesture as helpful in facilitating the thinking of Chinese corresponding verbs. Future studies are needed to corroborate whether intrinsic kinetographs do not help interpreters come up with Chinese corresponding verbs at all or whether they indeed help speed up searching for Chinese verbs but somehow the benefit is offset by the Coordination Effort.