On The Relationship Between Source Material Difficulty And Disfluencies Of Student Interpreters In E-C Sight Translation

Disfluencies remain an important theme in interpreting quality research.According to psycholinguistics,disfluencies produced in interpreting process reveal the cognitive overload of the interpreters.At the same time,source material difficulty has come into view in the interpreting field as the amount of interpreting pedagogical activities and researches are on the rise.This thesis takes Gile’s Effort Model as the theoretical support and uses empirical research methods to find out whether the source material difficulty parameters are correlated with the disfluencies in E-C sight translation among student interpreters and also to investigate the feasibility of a source material difficulty-based prediction model of interpreting disfluencies.It made a pioneering attempt in taking maximum dependency distance,information density,sentence length,and word length as the four measurements of source material difficulty and considering filled pause,silent pause,repetition and revision as the four parameters of disfluencies in interpreting.The research is mainly divided into two parts: variables-controlled interpretation experiment(focusing on maximum dependency distance),and a prediction test involving the influential parameters.The research obtains the following findings: 1.Maximum dependency distance is positively correlated with E-C sight translation disfluencies.2.Sentence length is positively correlated with E-C sight translation disfluencies.3.Both word length and information density have no or negligible relationship with E-C sight translation disfluencies.4.A prediction model of interpreting disfluencies that takes maximum dependency distance and sentence length as source material difficulty indicators can predict disfluencies in E-C sight translation output.The conclusions of this study are of referential significance for future interpreting pedagogy,training,accreditation and research.