Disfluency Patterns In English-chinese Sight Translation By Student Interpreters

Previous studies have shown that disfluency is a window to explore cognitive process of translation and interpreting.However,studies on disfluencies in sight translation are still relatively lacking.The present study examined the disfluency patterns of student interpreters in terms of frequency,duration,features and triggers.In particular,we explored the disfluency patterns of two groups of students at different interpreting stages in sight translation,and how variations of L2 proficiency in each participant group modulated the disfluency patterns.Fifty-eight junior students majoring in translation and interpreting as well as forty postgraduates majoring in conference interpreting were invited to participate in the experiment of an E-C sight translation,whose oral products were recorded.These participants also took an Oxford Quick Placement Test for their L2 proficiency.Disfluencies were categorized into juncture pauses,hesitation pauses,filled pauses,repetitions,lexical repairs and syntactic repairs.Analysis of the E-C sight translation output of student interpreters produced several findings.First,for all the student interpreters,the most frequent disfluencies were hesitation pauses,juncture pauses and filled pauses,which probably reflected the fact that the student interpreters were unbalanced bilinguals.Furthermore,the frequency of hesitation pauses was higher than that of juncture pauses while the duration of juncture pauses was longer than that of hesitation pauses,which probably reflected how unbalanced bilinguals processed language segments in sight translation.Second,advanced student interpreters produced less and shorter disfluencies than novice student interpreters,which suggests that more interpreting training reduces disfluencies and leads to more fluency in sight translation,a finding consistent with our intuition.Third,for novice student interpreters,Oxford QPT scores negatively correlated with the frequency of hesitation pauses,the duration and the frequency of filled pauses,with novice student interpreters of higher L2 proficiency producing less hesitation pauses and filled pauses as well as shorter filled pauses.For advanced student interpreters,Oxford QPT scores positively correlated with the duration of juncture pauses and the frequency of lexical repairs,with advanced student interpreters of higher L2 proficiency producing longer juncture pauses and more lexical repairs.These findings suggest that the interaction between L2 proficiency and interpreting training may be different for students at different stages of interpreting training.The experimental results shed light on how students at different stages of interpreting training conduct sight translation in terms of their output disfluency,which in turn has implications for interpreting instructors.Interpreting trainers need to enhance student interpreters’ sensitivity of disfluencies in their output and instruct them to improve linguistic competencies like vocabulary building and syntactic transfer.Advanced student interpreters with higher L2 proficiency should be advised to take both fluency and accuracy into account.