Effects Of The Continuation Task On Interpreting Trainees' Chinese-English Sight Interpreting Fluency

The Continuation Task is the manifestation of the Xu-argument in teaching.In recent years,the Continuation Task has been widely applied to the studies and practice of writing,spoken language and translation.This study is to carry out an experiment on 34 interpreting trainees on the theoretical basis of the Xu-argument.The experimental group is asked to finish the Sight Interpreting Continuation Task while the control group the non-Sight Interpreting Continuation Task.Three types of disfluencies — pauses,repeats and self-repairs are adopted for sight interpreting fluency assessment.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are taken for data analysis.This study is aimed to test the effects of the Continuation Task on interpreting trainees' Chinese-English sight interpreting fluency.Results show that alignment occurs in the Sight Interpreting Continuation Task,but compared with ample evidence of alignment at lexical level,insufficient evidence of syntactic alignment is found.Meanwhile,frequencies of pauses and repeats per minute are significantly higher in the experimental group's sight interpreting output than in the control group's output.However,there is no appreciable statistical difference in the frequencies of repairs per minute between the two groups.That's because alignment at lexical level occurring in the Sight Interpreting Continuation Task helps interpreting trainees to reduce such disfluencies as pauses and repeats that arise from lexical transfer difficulties.Yet they still cannot overcome the visual interference in sight interpreting and are restricted to the language structures of the source text,thus frequently repairing their output.At the same time,the alignment effect is masked by the strong visual interpreting and offers little help to them to reduce the occurrence of self-repairs as the result of syntactic transfer difficulties.