Unnatural Pauses In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting

This thesis studies unnatural pauses in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting.On the basis of literature review and previous studies,this thesis puts forward two research questions.1)What are the major reasons underlying the occurrence of unnatural pauses in C-E CI? 2)What are the differences in unnatural pauses between student interpreters and professional interpreters?In order to answer the above questions,this thesis adopts the research methods.First,an experiment is conducted.Research subjects are asked to interpret a speech from Chinese into English.Then pauses are labeled concerning the types,duration,and syntactic locations.Second,retrospective interviews are conducted.Subjects are asked to recall the causes for unnatural pauses in their CI production.The major conclusions are as follows.1)Concerning the major causes of unnatural pauses,searching for expressions in target language and restructuring taking up the most proportion.2)Compared with student interpreters,a)professional interpreters have lower frequency and shorter duration of unnatural pauses;b)professional interpreters' pauses are more likely to be located “before sentences” and “before clauses”;c)although professional and student interpreter share all the major reasons for unnatural pauses,professional interpreters have remarkably less unnatural pauses due to formulating and analysis of notes.