Investigating Pauses In Sight Translation

Pause is a non-fluency phenomenon,while fluency is an important standard in the assessment of interpreting quality.So pause is an important factor in the measurement of interpreting quality.Directionality is one of the contentious issues in interpreting research nowadays,directionality in interpreting refers to interpreters interpreting from a foreign language into a native language,or from a native language into a foreign language.However,most of the research on directionality in interpreting still focuses on the field of consecutive and simultaneous interpreting,and there are few studies on sight translation from the perspective of directionality.According to Cenoz’s theory on pauses,this study divides the pause into lexical pause,morphological pause and planning pause,and investigates pauses in sight translation by comparing the different performances of interpreters in English-Chinese and Chinese-English sight translation.Ten English major postgraduates from the School of Foreign Studies of Nanchang University were invited to experiment and complete a questionnaire after the experiment.By compiling the data,and analyzing the relationship between directionality and pauses in sight translation by paired samples t-test and case studies,this study aims to answer the following three questions:1.What are the characteristics and causes of pauses in sight translation?2.Does directionality affect pauses in sight translation?3.What are the reasons for the influence of directionality on the pauses in sight translation?The results of the study show that,in terms of overall characteristics,planning pauses account for the largest proportion of sight translation,followed by lexical pauses,and morphological pauses account for the smallest proportion.In terms of lexical pauses,the frequency of pauses in Chinese-English sight translation is higher than that in English-Chinese sight translation;while the frequency of pauses in English-Chinese sight translation is higher than that in Chinese-English sight translation in terms of morphological pauses.In terms of planning pauses,there is no significant change in the frequency of pauses in the two directions.As for the overall pause frequency,there is no significant change in the two directions.Therefore,although directionality has an effect on pauses in sight translation,it cannot be assumed that there are fewer pauses in sight translation in a certain direction.The causes of pauses include syntactic differences,textual interference,and the interpreters’ bilingual proficiency,these lead to comprehension and production difficulties for interpreters in sight translation.The main reason for the differences of pauses in different directions is the unbalanced bilingual proficiency of the interpreters.In this study,interpreters’ Chinese language proficiency is generally higher than their English language proficiency,so the interpreters are better able to monitor the output of Chinese,which led to a higher frequency of morphological pauses in the English-Chinese sight translation,while the lack of English language proficiency of the interpreters led to output difficulties and a higher frequency of lexical pauses in the Chinese-English sight translation.This study investigates pauses in English-Chinese and Chinese-English sight translation from the perspective of directionality,which can help students to conduct targeted training to reduce pauses in sight translation and can also shed light on the teaching of sight translation.The advance of the interpreter’s sight translation ability will also contribute to the progress of simultaneous and consecutive interpreting ability and the improvement of overall interpretation quality.