Stress and accent in community interpreting

This experimental study examines the relationship between accented speech and community interpreters’ stress. While previous studies have examined the potential impact of accent on interpreter performance, the interplay between stress and accent has received limited attention. The present study combines both in a single experimental study to investigate their potential relationship along with other participant-level variables. The results of this study were inconclusive regarding the level of stress experienced by community interpreters between the standard and regional US accents, which may suggest that accented language within a country may not be as strong of an influence on the stress levels in community interpreting. Participant-level variables including interpreter self-efficacy and trainee versus professional interpreters also showed non-significant results. However, the effect of task order was observed in the experimental setting, with the first interpreting task triggering a higher level of stress than the second task. This result suggests that there is a potential practice effect on interpreting performance and that stress results from the onset of the interpreting task as opposed to accented speech. In general, this study sheds new light on accent as a variable in interpreting, suggesting that the previously-observed impact of regional accentual varieties in simultaneous interpreting may not neatly extrapolate to other interpreting contexts or settings.