An Empirical Study On Possible Triggers And Coping Tactics For Students' Disfluencies In Chinese-English Simultaneous Interpretation

In the early stage of simultaneous interpreting training,many students are troubled by their disfluent output.This problem even gets worse in Chinese-to-English SI.Studies on disfluencies are gradually deepened in the sphere of natural languages,while those in interpreting studies are mostly based on experience,instead of empirical evidence.Therefore,this thesis pays attention to students'disfluencies in Chinese-English SI with an experiment and post-experiment interviews,in an effort to summarize possible triggers of DFs in the target language and provide strategies or coping tactics for future learners to address this problem.Based on the results of previous studies,this thesis focuses on four DF types in SI,namely,filled pauses,self-repairs,repeats,and incomplete sentences.It aims to analyze how DFs are correlated with interpreters' speech rate,individual habits of DFs,and figures.Based on Gile's Effort Models and Problem Triggers,the experiment tries to showcase the distribution of the four DF types and analyze their triggers in a quantitative way.In addition,a qualitative analysis is also carried out to figure out the features of certain DFs and the ways to deal with them.Three conclusions can be drawn from this experiment:filled pauses have the highest number of occurrences among the four types of DFs and are also positively correlated with three other disfluency types;the mean speed of interpreters has a positive correlation with DF frequency;and the accuracy of interpreted fig u res is not correlated to the DF frequency so much.Through a case study and a post-experiment interview,DFs of students are also triggered by multiple factors,which are divided into three major groups:external factors,internal factors,and unchangeable factors.Accordingly,students are expected to get trained or self-trained in a problem-oriented manner(e.g.,figure interpreting),learn to adopt timely and proper coping tactics(e.g.,syntactic linearity and deverbalization),and combine self-monitoring with self-confidence.The experiment tries hard to take variables under control to draw a more valuable conclusion.The results are slightly distinct from the previous work due to differences in subjects,purposes,and methods.Hopefully,future studies can get rid of the limitations in this thesis and draw an all-rounded conclusion.