An Empirical Study Of Pauses In Two-way Sight Translation

This thesis is an empirical study investigating pausing patterns in two-wayEnglish and Chinese sight translation. Through examining both filled and unfilledpauses in two-way English and Chinese sight translation, the present study is aimed toaddress the following three research questions:1) Try to examine the three parameters,namely pause duration, pause frequency and the distribution of pauses in the subjects’interpreting production.2) Does directionality exert an impact on interpreters’ pausepatterns in sight translation?3) Do pauses have any communicative values or strategicuses during the process of sight translation?Ten subjects were selected in the study. All of the ten subjects were second-yearpostgraduate English major students in the research field of interpreting studies atShanghai International Studies University. After the experiment, some follow-upquestions were asked. Their performances were recorded and transcribedimmediatelyafter the experiment. The software Praat was used to distinguishpauses longer than0.3seconds.The analysis shows that pauses tend to occur at the start of a new sentence or asense group; pauses appear in places where the language order discrepancy isapparent; unfilled pauses and filled pauses are more likely tohave a co-occurrenceappearance; and pauses often happen before proper nouns and nouns with Chinesecharacteristics.Three main positive functions of pausing patterns have also been summarized,which are:1) Pauses are used to emphasize an opinion or key words so as to draw theaudience’s attention;2) Pauses are made to win the interpreter some time for theupcoming information;3) Pauses are used as self-repair, such as word-changing,language structure rearranging and etc.This study sheds some light on sight translationteaching for postgraduate students.