DISFLUENCIES AND THEIR GESTURE PROFILES: THE ANALYSIS OF SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETING FROM L1 TO L2

Abstract

The article elaborates on the specifics of simultaneous interpreting as a highly demanding cognitive task which is reflected in the presence of speech disfluencies and co-occurring gestures. The analysis of simultaneous interpreting showed the differences in the distribution of speech disfluencies and demonstrated some correlations between these disfluencies and gestures. The data was obtained from 24 simultaneous interpreters, 12 per each group (Russian-English and Russian-German). The corpus was annotated in ELAN program and analyzed using quantitative and statistical methods. The results suggest that in simultaneous interpreting there are certain differences in the distribution of disfluencies, and in the ways they are accompanied by gestures. Such differences are related to the target language, namely, whether it is English or German. Thus, Russian-English interpreting demonstrated a higher variety of disfluencies accompanied by gestures in comparison to Russian-German interpreting as was shown in the results of the qualitative analysis. For adapters and pragmatic gestures significant statistical co-dependences were found between types of disfluencies and gestures both in Russian-English and Russian-German corpora, however these correlations played out differently for the two target languages. Almost no significant differences were found for the representational and deictic gestures: they did not frequently co-occur with the speech disfluencies in our data base - probably, due to their higher conceptual purport and to the increase of cognitive load during this type of activity.