Exploring Pausing Patterns in Two-way Sight Translation

Abstract

Other than stress and intonation, pausing has been proposed to be one of the prosodic elements which affect listeners' comprehension. In the field of interpretation, pauses are also considered as the most general index of (dis)fluency in the quality performance of interpreters. Several studies have been conducted to find out the correlations between silent pauses and interpreter's performance comparing non-Chinese languages, usually in the mode of simultaneous or consecutive interpretation. The results showed that silent pause, often measured in duration, frequency, and distribution, was inversely related to fluency.This study thus analyzed the pausing patterns of 20 graduate students with different level of training (9 advanced, 11 beginners). An English passage and its equivalent Chinese version were given to the subjects respectively to be read aloud once, and then the subjects immediately produced two-way sight translations.The results of the whole group revealed that between the two output languages, significant differences existed in pause frequency and distribution, but not for pause duration. Furthermore, it was found that interpreters perform better when working from their passive language into active language than vice versa, supported Lee's (2003) and Pochhacker's (2004) research results. Although Mead only analyzed the factor of pause duration, he found that the pause duration of professionals and students with more training did not differ between languages in terms of silent pauses. Comparing two subgroups, results of this study also show that the more experienced subjects make no noticeable difference on all three pausing parameters while the less trained subjects pause more frequently and ungrammatically in English. This indicates that training does affect subjects' pausing patterns.