Shanghai International Studies University Causes Of Improper Pauses In Chinese-to-english Consecutive Interpreting And The Coping Strategies

This paper explores pauses,as an index of fluency,in consecutive interpreting from Chinese into English,particularly the causes of and strategies to cope with improper pauses,with a special and unique focus on the mock conference of 2016 Overseas Infrastructure Investment Forum participated by the author.A bilingual corpus is built comprising transcripts of the speech and the interpretation,and improper pauses are codified for analysis.The findings are: First,improper pauses in consecutive interpreting from Chinese into English can be divided into silent improper pauses and filled improper pauses such as“ums”,“uhs” and repetitions.Second,improper pauses can be attributed to informational processing inefficiency and self-repair in interpreting.Major motivations include a poor application of interpreting techniques such as short memory,deverbalization,restructuring,and target language retrieving,as well as monitoring,modifying and self-repair skills.Accordingly,strategies can be used to prevent or at least reduce improper pauses in consecutive interpreting,such as specialized retelling and summary training,sight translation and sentence pattern transformation under the principle of syntactic linearity,public speaking as well as glossary building and paraphrasing.The results of the study afford tentative insight into improper pauses in C-E consecutive interpreting,and may benefit interpreting practices and relevant studies in the future.