Pauses in simultaneous interpretation: a contrastive analysis of professional interpreters' perfomances

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to describe the performances of 11 professional interpreters, who were asked to interpret two texts from English into Italian. The texts were read by a native English speaker, at two different speech rates, in order to compare pause occurrence in the source and target texts. Differences in terms of pause duration and pause function were recorded and categorised according to the current literature on pauses in psycholinguistics and rhetoric. The results obtained from the analysis of target texts were then compared to each interpreter’s subjective perception of their own delivery. Significant inconsistencies between the objective data and the subjective perception of performances were highlighted, which suggests that there is a need to enhance interpreters’ awareness of their own delivery.

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