An Experimental Report On The Pattern Of Unnatural Pauses In CI In Early And Late Bilinguals

It is axiomatic that interpreting carries weight in information transmissions and communications.In interpreting studies,quality assessment is a primary topic for its significance for interpreting teaching and training.Interpreting quality assessment encompasses many metrics,among which the disfluency is a major subject.One factor causing disfluencies is the unnatural pauses in interpreting.To examine unnatural pauses,which reflect the disfluencies in interpreting,is the starting point to assessing interpreting quality.Interpreting activities involve at least one language pair,i.e.,mother tongue（L1）and second language（L2）,and L2 competence has a telling effect on interpreting quality.Hence,the effect of L2 competence should be included when assessing interpreting quality.The current experiment,commencing on unnatural pauses,attempts to explore the pattern of unnatural pauses in consecutive interpreting（CI）in relation to the age characteristic of bilinguals based on two measurements,i.e.,filled pauses and unfilled pauses,and further assess the quality in CI.An audio file in English（length: 118 seconds,words: 290,difficulty: equivalent to CATTI Interpreting Level 3）was selected as the source material for CI.The experiment comprised 48 first-year students in the program of Master of Translation and Interpreting.They were divided into two groups at the age of 7 based on their age of second language acquisition（L2 Ao A）: early bilinguals（EBs）and late bilinguals（LBs）.All participants filled in Translation and Interpreting Competence Questionnaire（TICQ）and completed pre-tests for the collection of relevant data.All participants completed the English-to-Chinese CI task.Recordings of all participants’ CI deliveries were collected and transcribed into a text.Three individual editors revised the transcript and tagged the frequency of occurrence of filled pauses and unfilled pauses based on consistent standards for statistical analysis.The statistical results reveal that the frequency of occurrence of unnatural pauses is lower in EBs than in LBs.Results from TICQ show a significant difference of L2 Ao A in both groups,which has no subject-effect,meaning L2 Ao A has no effect on the pattern of unnatural pauses.Combining the results gathered from pre-tests and TICQ,EBs show better L2 competence,interpreting expertise and cognitive abilities than LBs.Therefore,it can be stated that these factors may impact the pattern of unnatural pauses in CI in both groups.The empirical experiment validates the pattern of unnatural pauses in CI in early and late bilinguals,that is,EBs have better L2 competence,interpreting expertise and cognitive abilities than LBs,leading to fewer unnatural pauses in CI,hence fewer disfluencies and better CI quality.Besides,the experiment offers pedagogical suggestions on the teaching and training of interpreting.