An Analysis Of Pauses In Disfluent Output Of Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

This paper is an empirical study investigating pauses occurring in Chinese-Englishconsecutive interpreting. It aims to address the following three questions:1) How is theoccurrence frequency of the filled and unfilled pauses?2) Where do the pauses tend tooccur during the process of Chinese-English interpreting? And where do they occur morefrequently? and3) What are the possible reasons behind all these pauses? We asked elevenpostgraduates in Shanghai International Studies University to participate in the experimentwith ten of them having interpreting as their major and one having literature as her majoryet with many real interpreting experiences. After the interpreting they were also asked toanswer some follow-up questions. Their performances were recorded and transcribedfaithfully after the experiment. We used the software cooledit pro.(2.1) to help distinguishany pauses longer than0.3seconds.Data analysis shows that six possible reasons, the first three as subjective reasons andthe remaining three as objective reasons are responsible for the surface pause phenomenon,namely the participants’ current exposure to English, degree of nervousness, invalidity oftheir notes, genre of the source text, proper nouns, words with Chinese characteristics andlow-frequency words in the source text and density of information. Findings yielded by thestudy reveal:1) Unfilled pauses and filled pauses tend to have a co-occurrence appearance;2) Pauses are likely to occur at the beginning of a sentence, before repetition and correction,proper nouns, nouns with Chinese characteristics and low-frequency words and in thoseplaces with high density of information. This study sheds some light on interpretingteaching of postgraduate students.