Pauses In Consecutive Interpreting

As one of the many forms of interpretation, consecutive interpreting shares the same criteria of evaluation with all the other kinds of interpretation, including faithfulness, expressiveness and taste. Among which fluency, an important indicator of expressiveness, is often impaired when the interpreter makes an unexpected pause, silent or filled. Sometimes, it may have a direct influence on the audience or customer's opinion about the quality of the interpretation. Thus comes the topic for this thesis.To analyze pauses in consecutive interpreting, both from Chinese to English and English to Chinese, this empirical study aims to test the following assumptions:1) Interpreters whose native language is Chinese pause less frequently and the length is shorter when interpreting from English to Chinese than from Chinese to English.2) Judging from pauses, interpreters with higher quality of interpretation from Chinese to English are likely to render a better interpretation from English to Chinese.3) Interpreters who make larger amount of silent pauses than others tend to make more filled pauses, vice versa.There are two groups of subjects in this study. Group A is made of 7 second-year masters in interpreting who are more experienced and well-trained while in Group B, there are 7 newly enrolled masters in interpreting in Hunan University with little experience in interpretation. All of their performances are originally recorded and faithfully transcribed. Software PRAAT is used in distinguishing any utterance gap longer than 0.3 seconds and SPSS is used for analyzing the data.According to the data collected, the first two assumptions are positively confirmed, which means that interpreters tend to make fewer pauses in English to Chinese consecutive interpretation than in Chinese to English with the basis that their mother tongue is Chinese, and the time duration of those pauses are also shorter. But judging only from the frequency and length of pauses, we found that interpreters with higher quality of interpretation from Chinese to English tend to have a higher quality of interpretation from English to Chinese, even though no positive or negative correlation between filled and silent pauses has been found.