Professional Interpreter’s Use Of Paralanguage In Chinese-to-English Consecutive Interpreting

Paralanguage refers to the non-verbal information accompanying language,including pause,filler,and tempo(Trager,1985).Consecutive interpreting(CI)is mentally stressful as it requires the interpreter to receive information from the speaker while transmitting it to the listener with the assistance of notes.In this process,the appropriate use of paralanguage can help interpreters understand complex concepts and organize logic to convey accurate information.In contrast,improper use of paralanguage affects speech fluency and makes interpretation less credible and acceptable.Recently,most researchers in interpreting studies have been concerned with the phenomenon and causes of inappropriate paralanguage used by student interpreters.Only a few of them have looked into the appropriate use and effects of paralanguage in interpreting,leading student interpreters to overlook the positive effects of paralanguage.Zhang Lu,an excellent interpreter in China,has worked at the Premier’s Press Conference for 13 years.In time-pressed and stressful diplomatic interpreting,Zhang Lu’s skillful use of paralanguage enhances interpreting accuracy.Hence,studying Zhang Lu’s paralinguistic features can be a model to inspire student interpreters to relearn paralanguage.This thesis builds an interpreting corpus that includes Zhang Lu’s interpretation at the Premier’s Press Conference from 2017 to 2021.ELAN,a multimodel annotation tool,is used to annotate paralanguage in the corpus and quantify its frequency,distribution,and duration in the interpreted texts.The above features are used to analyze the paralanguage functions.The results demonstrate that,firstly,the pauses are generally short pauses occurring before and after sentence and grammatical structures to reorganize dense information structures,explicate logical relations,and decode obscure and abstract terms;secondly,short fillers are used as a delay signal to gain thinking time in self-correction,and no fillers are used to make up for the loss of information to ensure fluency;thirdly,the tempo remains steady throughout the interpretation to emphasize the speaker’s dignified attitude;the tempo is slowed down to find equivalent expressions between Chinese and English when there are multi-digit numbers and complex terminologies.This thesis aims to help student interpreters relearn paralanguage and provide reference for their appropriate use of paralanguage while interpreting.