Saturday, July 2, 2011

VI. Revisiting Brasel (1976): Analysis #2 - Self-Repairs

Analysis #2 - Self-Corrections and Restatements

The second analysis was conducted on only the second data sample (of the three recordings made) for all fourteen subjects with complete data sets.  This analysis was inspired by an original observation by this researcher in the Spring of 2010 - it was observed that the first incidents of SELF-REPAIR within an interpretation among very skilled interpreters occurred around the twentieth minute (regardless of the target language - ASL or English).  After this first incidence of self-repair the observed interpreters regained their accuracy that they had previously had for several more minutes.  These unstructured observations lead to the desire to re-investigate interpreter fatigue and the pursuit of the current study.

From the data sets mentioned above, each was reduced to a fifteen-minute sample starting at 10:00 minutes and continuing until 25:00 minutes.  Incidents of self-repair were fairly obvious to note because they consistently co-occured with non-manual signals marking the self-repairs.  Two forms of self-repair were noted, and each presented with distinctly different non-manuals:

Self-Corrections were lexical errors that were replaced (or attempted to be replaced) with the more conceptually correct sign.  The non-manual signals that co-occured with this version consistently included an eye-blink at the point of halting the errant sign.  Twenty incidents of this type were observed and almost half (9 incidents or 45%) were related to self-correcting fingerspelling errors.



Re-Statements were processing substitutions that sometimes restated the exact same vocabulary but with a different word-order.  These self-repairs did NOT include eye-blinks at the point of restatement (a variety of other behaviors were observed including eye-gaze rolling upward (as in thought) or a brief pause while waiting for more source text information to be processed.  Seven instances of this type of Self-Repair were noted.



Overall 27 incidents of Self-Repair were recorded across twenty fifteen-minute samples.  Four samples had zero Self-Repairs (20%).  Seven samples had one Self-Repair (35%).  Six samples had two Self-Repairs (30%).  One sample had more than three Self-Repairs (5%).  Overall the average number of Self-Repairs was less than 1.5 per fifteen-minute sample.


Looking at the data across time there is no obvious pattern to the numbers of incidents of Self-Repair as related to the duration of the assignment.  This data set indicated two peaks at around ten minutes and around 14 minutes but otherwise the data indicates a fairly even number of incidents of Self-Repair across the entire time of the data samples.


The fact that most interpreters demonstrated at least one Self-Repair in their work, and that only one interpreter demonstrated more than two incidents suggests that looking at Self-Repairs may not be a productive evaluation of fatigue.  One interpreter exhibited more than two Self-Repairs within one fifteen-minute sample (but in another sample from the same interpreter only one incident of Self-Repair occured).  The shear number of incidents within the sample (six incidents within fifteen minutes, or an average of one Self-Repair every two-and-a-half minutes) may indicate interpreter fatigue for that interpreter, for that class, on that day.  In fact, a number of other behaviors were noted (stretching, non-manual behaviors exhibiting self-frustration) within the same fifteen minute sample that clearly indicated fatigue. Thus a high number of Self-Repairs would likely co-occur with other indicators of fatigue.  In other words, Self-Repairs are a normal part of the interpreting process and noting them in isolation is not likely to be a useful indicator of fatigue.