A Comparative Study Of Disfluency In English-Chinese Contextualized/Decontextualized Simultaneous Interpretation-A Case Study Of Second-Year MTI Students At HQU

Although more and more domestic scholars have begun to probe into disfluency in interpretation in recent years,the disfluency of contextual/decontextualized simultaneous interpretation is rarely studied by scholars.The comparison of disfluency in different situations falls generally in these three standards proposed by Mead(2005): speech rate,duration of pauses and mean length of run and this thesis is about to explore two questions: First,is there a dominant negative correlation between disfluency in simultaneous interpretation and text? Second,what is the difference between disfluency in contextual/decontextualized simultaneous interpretation? What are the causes?Quantitative and qualitative analysis are applied to answer the above questions.To testify three hypotheses put forward on the basis of previous study to answer the first question,seven second-year graduate students were invited to participate in experiment who major in interpretation at the School of Foreign languages,Huaqiao University.Then their distribution of disfluency in three aspects in these two experiments were compared and analyzed in a quantitative way.Besides,based on Gile’s Effort Models,there are face to face interview and questionnaire for subjects so as to find the characteristics of disfluency in different situations and relative causes.Firstly,about the first question,there is not a dominant negative correlation between disfluency and text.1)There is a negative correlation between disfluency and text in terms of speech rate.2)There exists quiet difference on the proportion of filled pauses and silent pauses in total pauses among subjects.And the number of total pauses in experiment B are more than that in experiment A.Most subjects have filled pauses,fewer silent pauses.Therefore,the disfluency is positively correlated with text in the aspect of duration of pauses.3)The standard deviation of mean length of run in experiment A is smaller than that in experiment B,which presents positive correlation between disfluency and text.Secondly,based on the case study and statistic data from post-experiment interviews,the causes of disfluency include the interruption of source text,inappropriate arrangement of efforts(listening and reading)and lack of confidence and several unchangeable factors.Accordingly,students are expected to get trained and make an instant adjustment based on the difficulty of text.Besides,teachers could increase simultaneous interpretation training with the help of text to reduce the frequencies and duration of disfluency.The comprehensive interpreting skills are acquired and appropriate strategies like syntactic linearity and deverbalization and self-monitoring could be applied according to different situations.