Research On The Disfluency In Chinese-english Sight Translation

Fluency is one of the important standards in the quality assessment of sight translation.In light of the methodology adopted by previous studies on disfluency in consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting as well as the characteristics of sight translation,this thesis attempts to make an experimental study of the disfluency in student interpreters' Chinese-English sight translation.Through an analysis of the four parameters of disfluency,namely,unfilled pause,filled pause,repetition and repair,this thesis is intended to achieve the following objectives:(1)To identify features of disfluency in student interpreters' Chinese-English sight translation;(2)To find out causes of disfluency in student interpreters' Chinese-English sight translation;(3)To raise suggestions on how to improve the fluency of sight translation.Subjects of the experiment were twelve English major postgraduates in the research field of interpretation studies in Shanghai International Studies University: six second-year postgraduates(group A)and six third-year postgraduates(group B).Both groups have received the same class training on sight translation during the second semester.All the subjects filled in the follow-up questionnaires after finishing the C-E ST tasks.The author collected all the ST recordings and questionnaires and transcribed the recordings into texts.The software Pratt was used to distinguish unfilled pauses.Unfilled pauses,filled pauses,repetitions and repairs were annotated in the transcripts for further analysis.The experiment results show that the total number of disfluencies of group A is much higher than that of group B;In terms of unfilled pause,filled pause and repetition respectively,the disfluency frequency of group A is obviously higher than that of group B while there is little difference between the two groups as to the frequency of repair;To both groups,unfilled pause is the biggest factor of disfluency,followed by filled pause,then repair and finally repetition;As to the distribution of disfluencies,group A tend to make disfluencies inside sentences while group B prefer to make disfluencies between sentences;The two groups share the tendency to make pauses,repetitions or repairs where the word order discrepancy is apparent and where there are proper nouns and phrases with Chinese characteristics;There are no positive or negative correlations among the four parameters.In addition,this thesis figures out three causes of disfluency: textual interference,lexical retrieval difficulties and syntactic difference.In the end,the author puts forward some suggestions for ST teaching and learning from the perspectives of bilingual proficiency,strategies and skills of ST and awareness of self-monitoring so as to improve the fluency of student interpreters' ST performances.