An Experimental Study Of Trainee Interpreters’ Disfluency In Chinese-to-English Consecutive Interpreting

Fluency has long been an important criterion in the assessment of speech quality,influencing the audience’s comments of interpreters.Disfluency is a common phenomenon in both native language expressions and the interpreting output.In the field of interpreting,previous researches mainly focus on simultaneous interpreting,while fewer studies are conducted in consecutive interpreting.This thesis focuses on a study conducted with ten second-year trainee interpreters of the Master of Translation and Interpreting program at Beijing Foreign Studies University.The main process is to simulate a conference in the interpreting classroom,recording each interpreters’ output and making online retrospective interviews respectively.Based on Maclay and Tissi’s category framework,this thesis takes both qualitative and quantitative methods to research the disfluency of trainee interpreters’C-E interpreting.The following questions will be answered:（1）major types of disfluencies among 10 participants in C-E consecutive interpreting;（2）characteristics of disfluency in terms of the frequency syntactic distribution;（3）major causes underlying the occurrence of disfluency;（4）suggestions for reducing disfluency.Results of the study show that there are four main types of disfluencies among trainee interpreters,including filled pauses,unfilled pauses,repeats,and self-repair.Among 10 trainee interpreters,unfilled pauses and filled pauses account for the highest proportion,followed by self-repair,and what accounts for the smallest proportion is repeats.Disfluencies inside phrases and before sentences are most common.The results of the retrospective interviews reveal that the most significant causes of disfluency among the 10 trainee interpreters are（1）Disfluencies caused by difficulties in listening comprehension and logical analysis;（2）Disfluencies caused by difficulties in finding,recognizing,and decoding notes;（3）Disfluencies caused by difficulties in formulating expressions.In response to the above problems,the following suggestions have been proposed to improve students’ Chinese to English interpreting:（1）reducing anxiety and increasing confidence during interpreting;（2）providing more interpreting resources for trainee interpreters,especially interpreting opportunities in a real interpreting environment;（3）making full preparations for the interpreting task,including terms,the speaker’s speaking habits,the background information,etc.;（4）offering special courses of note-taking for trainee interpreters;（5）having more practices in interpreting long sentences and discourses.