Eloy Rodriguez Gonzalez
Academic and research departments
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Centre for Translation Studies.About
My research project
Automatic speech recognition as a supporting tool for interpreters who perform remote simultaneous interpretingAfter experiencing what remote simultaneous interpreting feels like, I thought that remote interpreters might benefit from having access to a transcript or key information of the original speech that would be provided thanks to the integration of a speech recognition tool into the software used for the remote simultaneous interpreting.
Supervisors
After experiencing what remote simultaneous interpreting feels like, I thought that remote interpreters might benefit from having access to a transcript or key information of the original speech that would be provided thanks to the integration of a speech recognition tool into the software used for the remote simultaneous interpreting.
My qualifications
Affiliations and memberships
Publications
Remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) draws on Information and Communication Technologies to facilitate multilingual communication by connecting conference interpreters to in-presence, virtual or hybrid events. Early solutions for RSI involved interpreters working in interpreting booths with ISOstandardised equipment. However, in recent years, cloud-based solutions for RSI have emerged, with innovative Simultaneous Interpreting Delivery Platforms (SIDPs) at their core, enabling RSI delivery from anywhere. SIDPs recreate the interpreter's console and work environment (Braun 2019) as a bespoke software/videoconferencing platform with interpretation-focused features. Although initial evaluations of SIDPs were conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., DG SCIC 2019), research on RSI (booth-based and software-based) remains limited. Pre-pandemic research shows that RSI is demanding in terms of information processing and mental modelling (Braun 2007; Moser-Mercer 2005), and suggests that the limited visual input available in RSI constitutes a particular problem (Mouzourakis 2006; Seeber et al. 2019). Besides, initial explorations of the cloud-based solutions suggest that there is room for improving the interfaces of widely used SIDPs (Bujan and Collard 2021; DG SCIC 2019). The experimental project presented in this paper investigates two aspects of SIDPs: the design of the interpreter interface and the integration of supporting technologies. Drawing on concepts and methods from user experience research and human-computer interaction, we explore what visual information is best suited to support the interpreting process and the interpreter-machine interaction, how this information is best presented in the interface, and how automatic speech recognition can be integrated into an RSI platform to aid/augment the interpreter's source-text comprehension.