| It is generally believed that in spontaneous speeches, fewer pauses suggest higher fluency. However, studies foundthat pauses can have positive rolesof information segmentation, understanding facilitation, etc. Research on simultaneous interpreting (SI) also made breakthroughs in causes, characteristics and use of pauses, yet studies on English-Chinese SI are still limited.The study analyzed six SI trainees to explore frequency, duration and grammatical distribution of pauses in source text (ST) and target text (TT), and the correlation between pause pattern and fluency of TTbased on fluency scores given by20listeners.The study found that TT has less filled pauses and more silent pauses; less filled hesitation pauses, more vowel and consonant lengthening pauses, less silent hesitation pauses, and more communicative/grammatical pauses, In TT, silent pauses are longer while filled hesitation pauses are shorter in terms of both total and average duration; silent hesitation pauses have similar total duration but longer average duration; communicative/grammatical pauses have longer total and average duration.Fluency is found to have strong positive correlation with the proportionof communicative/grammatical pauses, silent hesitation pauses and pauses within a sentence to total and silent pauses; strong negative correlation with average duration of communicative pauses, pauses between sentences, pauses between subject and predicate, pauses between verb and object and pauses after connective/functional words. Average duration of pauses between subject and predicate, pauses between verb and object, and pauses between modifier and noun should be less than that of pauses after adverbial phrases and pauses after connective/functional words.The results can help trainee interpreters to understand the relationship between pauses in ST and TT, and improve frequency, duration and grammatical distribution of their pauses in TT so as to achieve better fluency. |
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