A Corpus-Based Study Of Metaphors As A Causative Factor Of Disfluencies In Chinese To English Consecutive Interpreting

When evaluating interpretation,loyalty and accuracy are the mostly discussed,while fluency,an important part of interpretation assessment,has not gained enough research attention.Since the comprehension and expression of metaphors,which are everywhere in communication,are both complicated cognitive process,and interpreters must quickly convey the meaning,metaphor interpreting is no doubt a difficulty for interpreters,causing more occurrences of disfluencies.Therefore,this research is focused on disfluencies caused by metaphors in Chinese to English consecutive interpreting.The study is based on a corpus composed of the interpretation by three levels of interpreters: excellent interpreting students,general professional interpreters and professional interpreters at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs(MFA)of China.It aims at answering the following questions: whether is metaphor a major causative factor of disfluencies in Chinese to English consecutive interpreting;and if it is,how are different levels of interpreters affected? What type of metaphors is most likely to cause disfluent interpretation? And which interpreting strategy is the most likely to lead to disfluencies?Taking a qualitative and quantitative approach to answering these questions,this study focused on three types of metaphors,namely,conventional metaphors,deliberate metaphors and novel metaphors.Four kinds of disfluencies are taken into consideration: silent pauses,filled pauses,self-corrections and repetitions.The metaphor translation strategies proposed by Peter Newmark are adopted by the research to study the correlation between interpreting strategies and disfluencies.This essay presents the results and provides an analysis to the reasons behind those phenomena with Conceptual Integration Theory(CIT)proposed by G.Fauconnier and M.Turner.The study has found that: 1)among all interpreters,the types of metaphors had the biggest impact on interpreting students.The lower the conventionality of the metaphor,the higher disfluency rate they got.General professional interpreters were also affected by what type of metaphors they interpret but not as much as students.Interpreters at the MFA seemed not to be influenced by the types of metaphors in terms of fluency.2)Conventional metaphors caused the least proportion of disfluencies,while deliberate metaphors led to the most.Compared with students,the two groups of professional interpreters presented excellent ability to deal with novel metaphors,the difficulty of which mainly lies in the first step of metaphor cognition—composition.3)As to interpreting strategies,replacing the metaphor in the source language with a metaphor in the target language led to the least disfluencies,while conversing the metaphor to sense caused the most for professional interpreters.For students,reproducing the same image in the target language led to the most disfluencies.In addition,the more professional the interpreters were,the less deletion was used.By analyzing the phenomena of disfluent production of metaphor interpreting from the perspective of metaphor cognition,the essay reveals the correlations between disfluent interpretation and levels of interpreters,metaphor types as well as interpreting strategies,and offers suggestions on how to improve the fluency of metaphor interpreting.