Technology Challenges and Aids: The Sustainable Development of Professional Interpreters in Listening Comprehension Effectiveness and Interpreting Performance

Technology plays a double-edged role in the interpreting job market. The development of technology may threaten the jobs of interpreters, as well as provide aids for them. The sustainable development of interpreters depends on determining the balance between the challenges and aids of modern technology so as to take advantage of it to enhance the performance of interpreting to fend off the challenge of technology itself. This paper launches these empirical studies by taking a tech product (a speech recognition device) as the study object, considering the lack of empirical studies about technology-assisted interpreting, as well as to explore the way and the extent to which the technology can facilitate interpreting performance in such a competitive world. Listening comprehension is generally regarded as the most difficult element in interpreting because understanding what we hear requires a colossal amount of cognitive effort, which will inevitably jeopardize the overall performance of interpreting. Therefore, how and to what extent the application of technology is capable of improving this performance is worth our attention. To measure the interpreting performance via the domain of language accuracy, message fidelity, etc., the empirical research conducted in the paper includes 30 student interpreters and 20 professional interpreters to explore the extent to which speech recognition assistance can increase the effectiveness of interpreting, as well as to shed some light on the professional sustainability and future training of interpreters.