Non-fluency and language-pair specificity in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting: A corpus-driven study

Language-pair specificity, which refers to linguistic and cultural differences between the language pair, has been hypothesized as one of the variables shaping the interpreting performance and product. The current study adopts a corpus-driven paralinguistic approach to testifying the language-pair specificity hypothesis. The corpus is a bilingual parallel corpus of Chinese-English Interpreting for Premier Press Conferences, which consists of 200,000 words/characters in total. The original and interpreted discourses are aligned at the sentential level and annotated at linguistic, paralinguistic, and extra-linguistic levels. The paralinguistic analysis focuses on non-fluency, specifically the different types of pauses and self-repairs. It is found that a majority of non-fluencies in the interpreted utterances are syntax-driven, which means that most of the pauses and self-repairs in Chinese-English interpreting are related to syntactical structures in the original speeches. The finding implies that language-pair specificity should be considered an important variable in research and training of interpreting between syntactically-contrastive languages.