The Impact Of Speech Delivery Rate On Disfluencies In English-chinese Consecutive Interpreting ——A Case Study Of Student Interpreters

Fluency is widely recognized as an important criterion to evaluate interpreters’ performance.A high speech delivery rate increases interpreters’ cognitive load,causing disfluencies such as pauses,repetitions,and repairs,etc.The present research sets out to probe the impacts of speech delivery rates on disfluencies in English-Chinese（E-C）consecutive interpreting（CI）.An empirical CI experiment was conducted among 11 student interpreters from the Advanced Interpreting Program at Shenzhen University.Six disfluency measures were adopted for statistical analysis: number of silent pauses per minute,silent pauses duration per minute,number of filled pauses per minute,filled pauses duration per minute,number of repairs per minute,and number of repeats per minute.By means of paired samples t test of SPSS,pairwise comparisons were performed separately for each of the six measures at a higher speech delivery rate（143.64 WPM）and at a standard speech delivery rate（114.5 WPM）.In particular,the study sought to answer the following questions:1.How are disfluencies（pauses,repetitions,and self-repairs）distributed in student interpreters’ E-C CI at standard and high source text delivery rates respectively?2.Does speech delivery rate have an impact on the distribution of the abovementioned disfluencies? If yes,what are the manifestations?3.Why does speech delivery rate influence disfluencies?An analysis of the experiment results yielded the following findings:1.In both target texts,silent pauses were the most frequently occurring type of disfluencies,followed successively by repairs,filled pauses,and repeats.2.For most student interpreters,increasing speech delivery rate had a negative effect on interpreting fluency: at a higher speech rate,the frequency of filled pauses and repairs as well as the duration of filled pauses per minute increased significantly in 11 subjects’ interpreting;the frequency of silent pauses increased in 10 subjects’ performances;the duration of silent pauses lengthened in 8 subjects’ outputs.However,no significant impacts were detected over the frequency of repeats.3.Causes of disfluencies are as follows: difficulty in comprehension,difficulty in formulation,difficulty with notes,memory failure,inappropriate coordination,and other causes.Based on the above findings,the following implications for interpreter training were provided:1.More effort should be committed to enhancing student interpreters’ bilingual linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge to streamline the comprehension and formulation processes.2.Student interpreters should endeavor to improve note-taking skills,memory and coordination abilities.3.Speeches of different delivery rates should be utilized to improve student interpreters’ ability to tackle with different speech rates.