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Article published In:
FORUM
Vol. 17:1 (2019) ► pp.1–19

Disfluency in relay and non-relay simultaneous interpreting

An initial exploration

| Hong Kong Polytechnic University & Qufu Normal University
| Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This corpus-based study explores the effects of relay interpreting at meetings of the United Nations General Assembly by comparing features of disfluency between the outputs of relay and non-relay simultaneous interpreting (SI). The findings are as follows: (1) the output of relay interpreting is shorter and more dispersive than that of non-relay interpreting; (2) filled pauses are the most common type of disfluency; and (3) the relay SI output shows fewer lexical and phonetic E-repairs and more A-repairs for ambiguity, syntactic E-repairs, and D-repairs than the non-relay output. The results suggest that the use of relay vs. non-relay interpreting may affect interpreters’ output.

Keywords: relay interpreting, disfluency, repairs, filled pauses, United Nations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research background
    • 2.1Disfluencies as predictors
    • 2.2Disfluency in simultaneous interpreting
    • 2.3Effects of relay interpreting
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data source
    • 3.2Controlled variables
    • 3.3Annotation
  • 4.Data analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Overview of annotation statistics
    • 4.2Analysis of disfluencies in SI output
      • 4.2.1Overview of disfluency distribution
      • 4.2.2Disfluency in relay and non-relay interpreting
      • 4.2.3Probing into repairs
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.18016.che
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