An Analysis Of The Causes Of Interpreting Pauses In English To Chinese Consecutive Interpreting And Their Coping Strategies

With the continuous development of globalization, the comprehensive nationalstrength of China has enhanced. More and more countries are willing to work withChina to seek cooperation and common development. With the increasing ofexchanges between countries, the demand for interpreters in various fields of ourcountry has gradually grown. In reality，interpreters play a pivotal role in the processof interpreting and their fluency is decisive on interpreting quality. Among allinfluencing factors of interpretation, pauses are the most obvious ones that cause theloss of fluency. Once interpreters produce an improper pause, the message conveyedwould come to a halt. As a result of this，they might fail to achieve their expectedresult during interpreting process.At present, researches at home and abroad are mainly concentrating on pauses inC-E interpreting and in the simultaneous interpretation. This thesis mainly focuses onthe pauses in E-C consecutive interpreting study. The thesis analyzes the causes ofpauses and provides the coping strategies of them with the purpose of giving asupplement to the current studies of pause phenomenon.This investigation selects a part of the speech by American President Obama inFudan University and collects10MTI students’ records of E-C interpreting assamples. The research divides the pauses into silent pauses and filled pausesaccording to the definition of Brigitte Zellner(1994). This thesis compares the data ofthese two kinds of pauses’ frequency and duration. At the same time, in order tounderstand the psychological activities of the participants and analyze the causes ofpauses, the investigation requires the interpreters to rehear their respective output afterthey have finished the subject at once. And then let them provide their feedbackswhich consist of the causes of their pauses and other problems.In this research, the causes of pauses mentioned by participants cover the fieldsof note-taking, listening and understanding, expression, figure interpreting, short-termmemory, knowledge storage, information and status of interpreters. For the main reasons, this study comes up with four coping strategies aimed at factors affectingpauses. This thesis attempts to improve the interpreting qualities through reducingpauses and supply guidance for the E-C consecutive interpreting teaching.