A Study On Student Interpreters’ Disfluencies In English-Chinese Simultaneous Interpreting

Disfluency is inevitable in speech output.It is worth noting that interpreting is rather complex and,in particular,simultaneous interpreting is time limited,which adds to its uncertainties and undoubtedly becomes the fuse of disfluency.The more fluent the target language is,the more accurately the audience can grasp the message.Consequently,fluency has become one of the important aspects when evaluating the performance of interpreters.Based on Gile’s Effort Model and Skopos Theory,this paper takes a speech with the theme of Disney Resort as a corpus to conduct an experiment of English-Chinese simultaneous interpreting and eleven MTI student interpreters as subjects.By the analysis of interpreting examples and data,the author concludes that disfluency can be found in every student interpreter’s work and,in this experiment,disfluency includes improper pause,repetition and self-correction,among which improper pause accounts for the largest proportion.By means of questionnaire,the author summarizes four reasons of the disfluency,which are difficulty in understanding the source language,imbalance in energy distribution,poor language habits and weak sense of self-monitoring.The author then gives four coping strategies to tackle these problems,including pre-task preparation,skillfully hedging,optimizing interpreting expression and strengthening self-monitoring,with the aim of providing some new ideas for student interpreters to wipe out disfluency in interpreting.