Issues of prosodic competency development in interpreting practice classes

Nowadays, highly qualified interpreters play a crucial role in different areas of the global world. Level of competencies, both personal and professional, defines excellence or level of professional qualification of an interpreter. Communicative skills of a qualified interpreter should include prosodic competency among the others. It assumes not only skills in reproducing phonemes and allophones, defining intonation, pauses, and speech tempo of a speaker but also abilities to interpret and render subtle nuances of a meaning with the help of proper intonation, speech tempo, pauses, and logical stress while interpreting to a target language. The study deals with the role of prosodic elements such as speech melody, tempo, rhythm, stress, and pausation. The importance of these elements for an interpreting activity is determined by the fact that a significant piece of information is transferred by prosodic elements and non-verbal means of communication. Therefore, it is reasonable to pay greater attention to the development of prosodic competency in interpreting practice classes. It can be achieved through a) special exercises that allow the students to learn and practise different phonetic styles both in native and foreign languages; b) providing students with knowledge of prosodic characteristics of emotions followed by their practical identification in the original speech and the search for the target-language equivalent for proper interpretation. In this regard, the author developed a set of special exercises and reading material. The study provided examples of the above-mentioned exercises and their in-class application methods. In conclusion, the research noted that the exercises designed to develop prosodic competency boosted the interpreting skills of students at the end of the semester.