An Emirical Study On Pauses In Consecutive Interpreting

Interpreter-related qualities have always been an important subject in interpreting studies. Over the last decades, researchers have conducted surveys, with the help of questionnaires and telephone interviews in an attempt to find out what parameters should an interpreter's performance be measured against. Among many include completeness, correct grammar, cohesion, fluency, and pleasant voice. Fluency has consistently been rated as very important. It may even color users'perception of accuracy.This thesis examines pauses as an indicator of fluency, or the lack of, in consecutive interpreting into Chinese and English. Seven second-year students of conference interpreting, all with Chinese as A language, were invited to participate in the study to test the hypothesis that student interpreters have more fluent output in the A language than in the B language. Overall, the hypothesis is confirmed. Both total pauses and average pause times per minute are greater when interpreting into B. The same is true of silent pauses, but not of filled pauses.The study also examines interpreters'perception of why they pause. 74% of the explanations given on pauses into B go to difficulties in language formulation, while logical analysis of the source language in English and notes are two major obstacles into A. The study on pause positions shows that 94.8% of pauses at syntactic boundaries are silent pauses, which suggests that they are well under control. On the other hand, filled pauses are more common when unnatural pauses do occur, signaling difficulties in production. The subjects generate more pauses in some segments than in others. Such segments are highlighted and analyzed. It turns out that the Chinese speech is difficult when a sentence is without a subject or with several idioms back to back; or when it is rendered using an inverted English sentence. The English speech can be difficult when there are numbers, names or metaphors.