Trainee Interpreters’ Pauses In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting ——A Study Of Xi Jinping:the Governance Of China Volume Ⅰ

Consecutive interpreting is one of the basic working modes of interpreting,which is applied to various occasions.Fluency is one of the important factors and criteria of the interpreting quality while disfluency or non-fluency may deteriorate the interpreting quality.There are various definitions and classifications of disfluency,among which pause has always been a significant classification and an indicator of disfluency.Studies of pauses include not only the type,distribution of,and reason for pause,but also the correlation between pause and other factors,such as directionality and interpreting level.However,a limited amount of studies focus on the type,distribution of,and reason for pauses in Chinese-English interpreting at the same time.Therefore,this study is aimed at bridging the gap and enriching the research in this field.Based on the theory of Mead and Cenoz,this study finally forms its own theoretical framework.Combined descriptive statistics with case analysis,this study has three major research questions:1)What type of pause occurs most frequently in interpreting?2)How does the pause distribute in interpreting?3)What is the possible reason for the pause?This study involved 15 trainee interpreters,all of whom are second-year graduate students of English interpreting class 2020,School of English and International Studies,Beijing Foreign Studies University.All participants have received one-and-a-half-year systematic interpreting courses.In the beginning,every participant received and signed the informed consent of this study.All participants recorded their Chinese-English consecutive interpreting as audio for data collection.The interpreting was transcribed through the website jianwai.netease.com,an AI audio-recognition platform,and processed by Cool Edit Pro 2.0.By Cool Edit Pro 2.0,pauses were identified and their duration was measured.The type and distribution of pause were also identified and noted in the interpreting transcript.Every participant also received an immediate retrospective interview.During the retrospective interview,the interpreting recording was replayed for the participant.When there was a pause in interpreting,the recording was paused and open and objective questions were asked to them,so as to figure out the possible reason for every pause.The retrospective interview was recorded as audio and the interview recordings were transcribed through the website jianwai.netease.com as well.According to the interview,different reasons for the pause were sorted out.This study demonstrates the types,distributions of,and reasons for pauses in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting.In terms of types,pauses are mostly demonstrated as silent pauses.In terms of distribution,pauses are mostly positioned within a clause.In terms of reasons,the most frequent reason is related to formulation,and the second biggest reason is related to notes.It demonstrates that trainee interpreters manage to cope with difficulties in interpreting with silent pauses,so as to produce less interruption to listeners.Trainee interpreters find it difficult to plan the whole sentence before they start a sentence,so they need to pause within a clause.Trainee interpreters still need to acquire both linguistic knowledge and non-linguistic knowledge.This study not only covers the type,distribution of,and reason for pause in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting,but also sheds a light on the teaching and training of consecutive interpreting.This study also has some limitations,such as the lack of a data collection environment and limited sample size,which could be improved in future studies.