An Empirical Study Of Impacts Of Directionality On Fluency Of English-Chinese Two-way Sight Translation

Sight translation is an important form of interpreting,which is widely used in international conferences and on other occasions.Sight translation is also an important pre-training for consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting.Directionality has always been a topic of debate among interpreting practitioners and scholars who study interpreting.Fluency is an important indicator to measure the quality of sight translation.At home,the research on the interpreting directionality,fluency,and sight translation lags behind that in foreign countries.The purpose of this thesis is to research the impacts of directionality on the fluency of sight translation.In this research,the author adopts four disfluency indicators,namely silent pauses,filled pause,repetitions,and repairs.The research aims to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the features of disfluencies in sight translation in different directions?(2)Does directionality have significant impacts on sight translation fluency?If yes,how?The research subjects are 17 students majoring in English interpreting at Shaanxi Normal University,of which 12 are first-year student interpreters and 5 are second-year student interpreters.The 17 subjects all completed both English-Chinese and ChineseEnglish sight translation experiments.After that,the author transcribed their recordings,and marked four disfluency indicators,namely silent pauses,filled pauses,repetitions,and repairs in their transcripts.The duration of silent pauses was calculated by Adobe Audition CC 2019,and then marked by the author manually in the transcripts.After marking all disfluencies,the author made statistics on these four disfluency indicators for further qualitative and quantitative analysis.The experiment results show that:(1)A large number of silent pauses coincide with respiration;silent pauses occur at sentence boundaries,at clause or phrase boundaries,after conjunctions of a clause,within a clause,within a phrase,or within a word.There is often an SP between paragraphs;there are different types of repetitions,including syllable repetitions,phrase repetitions,and sentence repetitions;there are a large number of silent pauses in the sight translation output of student interpreters.In both directions,among the four disfluencies examined in this study,silent pause is the most frequent one,followed by filled pauses,then repairs,and finally repetitions;the proportion of each subject’s total time of SP in his/her recording time is generally high,some even account for over half of the recording time;In the output of subjects,there are super long silent pauses.Silent pauses over 10 seconds occur only in English-Chinese sight translation,but not in Chinese-English sight translation.(2)Correlation analysis of the corresponding data in the two directions performed by SPSS 26.0 shows that there is no statistically significant differences between E-C and C-E ST in terms of the frequency of silent pauses,filled pauses,repetitions,repairs,silent pauses duration per minute and average silent pause duration.(3)Directionality exerts no significant effect on the fluency of student interpreters’ sight translation.According to the results of this research,the author suggests that student interpreters and interpreting teachers should work together to enrich students’ sight translation skills,cultivate students’ strong sense of fluency,strengthen students’ self-monitoring and capability to allocate cognitive resource in the process of sight translation,and improve automaticity of interpreting output,so as to comprehensively improve student interpreters’fluency in sight translation.This research has certain guiding significance for improving the fluency and quality of sight translation of student interpreters,and the pertinence and effectiveness of interpreting teachers’ teaching.It has certain value of reference for future research on sight translation,directionality,fluency,etc.