An Empirical Study Of Disfluency Of Interpreters With Different Levels Of Interpreting Competence

Fluency is an important criterion for evaluating interpreting quality,but temporal variables are seldom used in domestic research to examine fluency in interpreting.Therefore,this thesis adopts speech rate,duration of disfluencies and the mean length of run suggested by Mead(2005)as criteria for assessing disfluency to figure out two questions: First,can the speech of interpreters with a higher level of interpreting competence be more fluent than that of interpreters with lower interpreting competence? Second,is there a difference between the two groups of interpreters in terms of the most frequently occurring causes for disfluencies?The author selected 22 graduate students pursuing MTI at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies(GDUFS)as subjects and divided them into Groups A and B according to their performance in the consecutive interpreting(CI),i.e.,Level 2 of CATTI.Group A have higher interpreting competence than Group B.All the subjects conducted a Chinese-English consecutive interpreting and were asked to explain the causes for disfluencies after the experiment.The research finds out that interpreters with higher interpreting competence deliver message in a more fluent way than interpreters at a lower interpreting level.What's more,Group A are mostly affected by optimizing expressions and Group B are mostly influenced by formulation in the process of interpreting.The research results implicate that trainee interpreters need to accumulate adequate English chunks and stay in practice so as to improve interpreting automation.And for teachers,in addition to the instruction of on-line interpreting strategy,they may also provide more off-line interpreting strategies in order to make students acquire more comprehensive interpreting skills.Therefore,the thesis can be useful in improving trainee interpreter's performance as well as interpreting teaching.