Approaching Pauses In C-E And E-C Consecutive Interpreting:from The Perspective Of Working Memory

Fluency is an important criterion in interpreting performance evaluation.Pauses can lead to disfluency and thus have become a research focus of interpreting studies.According to former studies,pauses are closely related to cognitive processing of interpreters and the influence of working memory on pauses has been paid more and more attention to.This thesis tried to examine the separate roles of general working memory capacity and its resource allocation efficiency for a full understanding.Moreover,this thesis tried to explore the differences between Chinese-English and English-Chinese interpreting to provide more evidences for debates in directionality and to give guidance for interpreting training.The current research aimed to probe into major pause types and to dig into the mental mechanism behind pauses from the perspective of working memory.Based on Baddeley's Working Memory Model,Gile's Effort Model and Levelt's Speech Production Model,the present study consisted of C-E and E-C listening span tasks as well as C-E and E-C consecutive interpreting tests.Moreover,to gather first-hand information from subjects,stimulated recall was conducted.In terms of data analysis,Praat was used to analyze pause frequency and average pause duration,and SPSS was used to analyze experimental data.The subjects were 10 post-graduates majoring in interpreting from Shanghai International Studies University,who had all been trained in interpreting for at least one year and had passed required tests.The research has the following findings:(1)in both CE and EC interpretations,the main causes of pauses are language formulation,note reading,and information retrieval from memory.And interpreters will also pause because of restating,hesitation,and repetition;(2)working memory can influence pause frequency.But general working memory capacity alone doesn't have a final say because a high capacity cannot take effect without the help of high resource allocation efficiency;(3)there are great differences between pauses in CE and EC interpreting.These differences are due to different effort models and working memory is responsible for the allocation of these efforts.The differences between pauses in CE and EC interpreting shows that interpreters cannot get rid of the influence of linguistic structures totally,which challenges the Deverbalization Theory.