Causes Of Pauses In English-chinese Consecutive Interpreting And Coping Strategies

Pause is an essential index that affects fluency in consecutive interpreting.Interpreters may find that pauses have a direct impact on the performance of the interpreter and even cause the audience's distrust of the interpreter.By classifying different types of pauses in consecutive interpreting of the mock conference,this thesis explores three main factors causing pauses and possible strategies to cope with the pauses discussed.Based on the studies both at home and abroad,this thesis starts by defining and classifying different pauses in consecutive interpreting.Then the background and features of the case are further explained.This thesis mainly focuses on the case study on mock conference of Joseph Nye's speech “Will Liberal International Order Survive?” at Oxford Union which features a great number of historical and international events,a wide range of background knowledge and various speaking manners of different speakers.Disfluency and misunderstanding are created due to pauses of the author in English-Chinese consecutive interpreting.Therefore,by analyzing typical instances of pauses in the case,this thesis elaborates causes of pauses in consecutive interpreting from three aspects which are information processing,sentence constructing and external factors.On the basis of former analysis,this thesis concludes with feasible corresponding strategies to deal with pauses in consecutive interpreting:(a)effectively distributing effort and paying attention to the forecasting of the following speech,improving note-taking system and enhancing short-term memory;(b)cultivating the ability to respond quickly and acquiring extralinguistic knowledge,employing the method of strategic pause discriminately based on the features of different original texts;(c)strengthening the ability of stress-handling and self-monitoring.