Experimental Study Of Improper Pauses In Consecutive Interpretation Training

Recently, the quality of consecutive interpretation (CI) has gained more and moreattention in the study of interpretation. One of the factors which exert great influence on thequality of CI is fluency. For interpreters, especially for trainees (such as the MTI students),improper pause is a main reason which causes disfluency in CI.With the data from related questionnaire and experiment, this paper aims to analyze themain causes of improper pauses in CI and divides them into3types: causes that occur at theinformation input stage, at the note-taking stage and at the information output stage. Besides,the psychological causes as well as some other causes (such as slip of tongue and poorlanguage habit) are also analyzed. Based on the cause analysis, some effectivecountermeasures are proposed: skills training and accumulation of necessary knowledge,sufficient preparation and psychological quality improvement. Some other measures (suchas taking CI simulation practices) are also proposed.The aim of this paper is to help interpreters, especially trainees, to improve their CIquality.