An Empirical Study On Pauses In C-E Simultaneous Interpreting

This thesis mainly deals with pauses in the C-E SI. Based on literature review ofrelevant studies, three research questions on characteristics and reasons of pauses areraised.To answer these research questions, the following research methods have beenadopted: firstly, an observatory approach has been taken. To build a corpus forobservation, subjects were invited to interpret a spontaneous speech from Chineseinto English. Their performances were recorded on double-track recordings with thehelp of Adobe Audition3. Afterwards both the original speech and theseinterpretations were transcribed and pauses were codified in terms of their types,durations, and syntactic locations. Secondly, a retrospective interview has beenconducted, in which subjects were stimulated to recall the reasons for unnaturalpauses in their SI production.The major conclusions of the research are as follows. First, C-E simultaneousinterpretation has lower frequency and longer average duration of pauses than that ofthe original speech. Second, there is a hierarchical distribution of pauses based oncomplexity of linguistic status, except the fact that pauses inside phrases aredisproportionately high. Third, the major causes of unnatural pauses in C-E SI arewaiting, formulating and restructuring. Forth, professional and trainee interpretersdiffer in characteristics and reasons of pauses. The current thesis gives explanationson these findings based on the nature of the SI, Gile’s Effort Models and Levelt’sSpeech Production Theory.