An Empirical Study Of Pauses In Student Interpreters’ English-Chinese Consecutive Interpreting

The fluency of delivery has been regarded as one of the crucial criteria in assessing the quality of interpreting.Pauses made in consecutive interpreting can reduce the quality of interpreting performance by hindering the transmission of information in the source language.Although disfluency has been rather commonly discussed by scholars over the past few decades,pauses,especially those made in English-Chinese(E-C)consecutive interpreting,are much less touched.The inadequacy in this regard,therefore,calls for further studies.Guided by Levelt’s speech production model(1989)and Xu’s experiment(2010),this thesis presents an empirical study of pauses in student interpreters’ E-C consecutive interpreting.With the help of interpreting experiments,this study aims to explore the following questions:i)main types of pauses in E-C consecutive interpreting;ii)features of each type of pauses;iii)possible reasons behind different pauses in E-C consecutive interpreting;iv)ways to reduce or avoid pauses in interpreting practice.In this study,12 postgraduate students from Beijing Foreign Studies University are invited to finish two interpreting tasks and then take stimulated recall protocols.Based on findings from the experiment,the author employs Cool Edit pro 2.1 software to analyze pauses by categorizing them into different types,exploring their features and finding out possible reasons behind them.The study shows that pauses caused by factors related to interpreting information and reproduction represent the highest percentage of all pauses made in E-C consecutive interpreting,whereas the employment of interpreting strategies is less likely to cause pauses.Pauses caused by expression extraction and idea formulation have higher frequencies than other types,and the mean duration of paused caused by improvement is the longest.Based on a thorough analysis on pauses,this study may provide some pedagogic implications for the consecutive interpreting training of student interpreters.Given several limitations in this experiment,improvement still needs to be made in further studies in the future.