Variation in non-fluencies in a corpus of simultaneous interpreting vs. non-interpreted English

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present study aims to investigate the occurrence of various non-fluencies (mispronounced words and hesitations; self-repairs and editing terms; silent pauses; repetitions; fillers) in interpreted and non-interpreted, spontaneously produced English. The material for the study is the English component of a parallel bidirectional corpus of Russian-English interpreting of political discourse, consisting of approx. 130,000 words from 77 speech events. The instances of non-fluencies have been automatically extracted from the corpus, with the exception of self-repair, which was subject to manual annotation. The figures for the two subcorpora were compared using the Mann-Whitney U test, chi-square test, and Fisher’s exact test, as appropriate. The results show that (1) interpreted English has more disfluencies overall, and serial truncations specifically; (2) the number of repaired disfluencies is lower in interpreted English; (3) and interpreted English has fewer fillers and disfluent repetitions than non-interpreted English. The results on editing terms are inconclusive. While the first finding conforms to the predictions in the literature on SI, the other two can be ascribed to differences in style among interpreters.