A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Professional And Student Interpreters’ Pause Phenomena In Consecutive Interpreting

Now lots of countries are cooperating with China in broad fields. Under such a good environment, China’s interpreting market is presenting a picture of prosperity. Among various interpreting forms, consecutive interpreting plays a very important role, and is widely used in business conferences, receptions and so on. However, the occurrences of pauses are very common in consecutive interpreting because of pressure, etc. By studying the pause phenomena in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting, this thesis aims to work out the following three questions: 1) What kinds of differences exist in the interpreting work of professional and student interpreters in such aspects as pause frequency, length and position? 2) What are the underlying causes for such kinds of phenomena? 3) What is the thesis’ s significance for teachers and students?In this thesis, the Chinese data are audio files excerpted from Premier Wen Jiabao’s speech in press conferences of year 2007-2011; and the English data are composed of the professional interpreters’ spot interpretations and 15 third-year students’ interpretations. With the help of a software called Adobe Audition, pause lengths in all the English data are tagged, based on which this thesis makes a contrastive study of the pause phenomena between professional and student interpreters. First, a contrastive study in the aspects of frequency and length of silent and filled pause is carried out, and it is found that be it student interpreters or professional interpreters, the frequency and length of their silent pauses are both more than that of filled pauses. Besides, only student interpreters’ frequency of silent pause is close to professional ones’. The following step is a study on pause position. Generally speaking, the pauses produced by professional interpreters are usually at bigger syntactical boundaries, which makes their interpretations sound more natural and fluent. The final step is a calculation of pause frequency and length at three positions in each paragraph, and, based on these statistics, the author focuses on the analysis of paragraphs that student interpreters have made the most pauses. The tentative conclusions are as follows: from the angle of word class, the student interpreters’ pauses usually occur before numerals, nouns, verbs and adjectives. Specifically speaking, they are often before the object of a verb-object phrase or the head word, or after the preposition “to” introducing an adverbial clause of purpose; at the sentence level, the student interpreters’ pauses may occur when the information density of the original sentence is high, or when the logic of which is not so clear or explicit. In both two levels, similarities also have been found between professional interpreters and student interpreters.In the light of the contrastive studies above, it is concluded that most of the student interpreters have consciousness to control their filled pauses, but at the same time they are still not capable of doing that because of some subjective reasons such as lack of monitoring ability,low availability of knowledge and some objective reasons such as unclear expression of sentences in source texts. As a result, student interpreters produce much more filled pauses and longer length of silent pauses than professional interpreters do, and their pauses usually occur at smaller syntactical boundaries. At last, some suggestions on methods to minimize pauses are given, which should shed some light on students’ studies, the pedagogy of interpretation and future research.