Perception of the Arab non-native accent in Spanish and its incidence on the message delivery.

Abstract

Simultaneous interpreting from Arabic into Spanish (AR-SP SI) is, on the whole, carried out by native Arabic speakers. 87.5% of AR-SP interpreters based in Spain have Arabic as a mother tongue and Spanish as a foreign language. Given this peculiarity, it was interesting, as well as novel, to analyze users' perception of AR-SP SIin order to find out how they assess the interpreter’s non-native accent in Spanish and its incidence on the fidelity and accuracy of the source speech delivery. In order to do this, this study sounded out the opinion of 50 users, who after watching a meeting interpreted into Spanish by a native Arabic speaker, responded to a short questionnaire.