Study On Sentence-initial Pauses Of English To Chinese Consecutive Interpreting

The quality of interpreting is one of the main researching subjects for the interpreting theoretical studies and to improve the quality of interpreting is also one of the core teaching targets for Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) training. In the last decades, researchers from home and abroad have conducted various studies on interpreting quality assessment with great accomplishments. Results reveal that fluency is regarded as a significant index for interpreting quality assessment; meanwhile, pauses in interpreting as one cause to affect interpreting fluency are also treated as the significant factors to interpreting quality assessment. Interpreting pause studies have gone through a relatively long time in foreign counties, delightfully, many achievements also have been made in recent years by Chinese scholars and researchers in this field. Based on the findings of former studies, this paper mainly emphasizes the sentence-initial pauses in English to Chinese consecutive interpreting, which is more specific in studies of interpreting pauses.On the basis of Gile’s Effort Models and experimental prototype from Peter Mead’s doctoral dissertation, ten trained interpreting students, majored in translation and interpretation are selected to interpret one elaborately excerpts of English to Chinese speech in order to study the sentence-initial pauses in E-C CI, during which recording, covered observation and stimulated recall are used to provide the original data. Results show that sentence-initial pauses in E-C CI bear following features:a. sentence-initial pauses in E-C CI are divided into three types with seven sub-types according the positions of fillers during interpreting; b. the filled pauses, accounting for57.91%, is more than unfilled ones with46.09%; c. the second sub-type of filled pauses, namely,"-filler", takes up62.10%in the total filled pauses frequency with the highest percentage among the pauses’ types. Meanwhile, three main causes for sentence-initial pauses also are revealed in the findings, namely, pauses due to target language organization; pauses due to target language retrieval and pauses due to note-reading.In-depth thoughts on sentence-initial pauses from further concerns are also provided in this study. Based on the main causes of those pauses, related coping tactics to minimize sentence-initial pauses are issued as references which include building active bilingual language schemata, enhancing note-taking skills, building confidence and keeping semi-exciting state during interpreting. In addition, analyses are conducted to find the features of top complex sentence groups in original language which show that the English speech is more difficult when it includes numbers in bulk, parallel structures and logic relation analyses.