An Empirical Study of Pausing Patterns in Two-way Sight Translation

Abstract

In the field of interpreting studies, many experts (Gerver, 1975, 1976; Shlesinger, 1994) argued that the prosody of a language such as stress, pausing, and intonation used by interpreters might be different from general public. On the other hand, Mead (2000, 2002, 2005) considered pauses as the most general index of (dis) fluency in the interpreting process due to the limited scope of planning. A number of studies have been conducted to find the correlation between the afore-mentioned prosodic elements and the interpreter's performance involving non-Chinese languages. The results revealed that the hesitation of speech, measured in duration, frequency, and distribution, was inversely related to fluency. Focusing on analyzing the pausing patterns in sight translation, this study aims to compare the pausing patterns of 29 subjects' interpretations of an English-to-Chinese passage to those of an equivalent Chinese-to-English passage where English is the subjects' passive language while Chinese is their active language. The results showed that there were significant pause frequency and pause distribution differences between the subjects' two output languages, but not for pause duration. That is, the number of pauses and the number of within-constituent pauses were found to be good indicators of fluency and the performance of the interpreters. It was further found that the subjects performed significantly more fluently when working from their passive language into their active language than vice versa.