A Case Study On Disfluency In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpretation

In the field of consecutive interpretation, fluency is considered as one of the mostimportant factors in assessing an interpreters’ performance. Lack of fluency maydetriment not only the interpreter’s delivery but also his or her credibility among theaudience. Structured in the form of practice report, this paper examines disfluency inEnglish-Chinese interpretation on the basis of the author’s interpretation at theSigning Ceremony for the Launching of the Construction of New-Energy AutoIndustry Park. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are adopted in the currentstudy.The purpose of this paper is three-fold:1) to find out the most frequentlyoccurring type of disfluency in the author’s interpretation;2) to investigate the rootcauses of disfluency;3) to provide possible solutions to disfluency in English-Chineseconsecutive interpretation.By comparing the author’s interpretation with the source speech, the present workfinds that filled pauses occur most frequently among the four common types ofdisfluency, with the other three being silent pauses, repetitions and corrections. Thecauses of them are the interpreter’s inadequacy in fluent language delivery, short-termmemory and listening comprehension of English etc., all of which can be addressedthrough targeted practice and training.