Disfluency In Interpreting

This report is based on an interrogation interpreting assignment completed by this author at a police station in Guangzhou in July,2019.The interpreting was delivered for the police station to facilitate the interrogation by the law enforcement officers of the suspect from Yemen in a case of drug abuse and trafficking.The report covers task description,process description,case study and a conclusion.Besides completeness,faithfulness and smoothness,fluency,or lack thereof,is one important yardstick by which to measure the quality of interpreting.Therefore,in the case study part,the author focuses on two major aspects of disfluency,namely,self-repairs and repeats which she experienced in the assignment,reflects and tries to analyze the possible causes and work out some corresponding coping strategies.The author discussed the instances of self-repairs which she experienced in four categories: different repairs,appropriate repairs,error repairs and compound repairs.It is found the causes of her self-repairs include false starts,uncertain knowledge of English grammar,slips of the tongue,lack of common sense,and an intension of gaining extra time to make the expression more precise and understandable.The report then studies syllabic repeats,word repeats and semantic repeats.It is found that she found she tended to repeat question words at the beginning of a sentence to gain more time to think over what she was going to say and use different expressions to convey the same meaning in order to make sure she was fully understood.The investigation of self-repairs and repeats further strengthens the author's realization that to minimize such disfluency,one needs to enhance his or her competence in both languages involved,to constantly monitor his or her output,and make timely self-corrections.With this report,the author hopes to provide a clearer picture of interrogation interpreting for those who wish to take similar interpreting assignment and make the whole delivery more fluent.