Disfluent Pauses In English To Chinese Consecutive Interpreting And Solutions

Pause,as one of the major forms of speech disfluency,is a key factor that affects the quality of English-to-Chinese consecutive interpreting.Disfluent pause is a form of pauses that impact interpreting fluency.Disfluent pause can be divided into three types,namely lexical pause,morphological pause and planning pause.Empirical studies on pauses from this perspective are still rare.This case study aimed at exploring the following two questions based on the consecutive interpreting practice of “APEC CEO Summit 2016Peru”: First,specific forms and causes of disfluent pauses in the chosen case.Second,solutions to the disfluent pauses in English-to-Chinese consecutive interpreting.Results showed that firstly,all three types of disfluent pauses appeared in the case with planning pauses appearing most frequently.Most of the silent pauses longer than 0.25 seconds were planning pauses.Secondly,disfluent pauses of the same type might be caused by different reasons while those of different types might be caused by the same reason.Thirdly,the causes of disfluent pauses can be divided into three categories,i.e.,preparation(background knowledge and terminology),interpreting skills(deverbalization and note-taking)and language(proficiency and sight-translation).To reduce or avoid disfluent pauses in consecutive interpreting,interpreters may need to work on these three fields respectively.