Correlation between Directionality and Disfluency in English-Chinese Bilateral Sight Translation

Directionality has always been a topic of debate among interpreting practitioners and scholars. Disfluency, as an important indicator, measures the quality of Sight Translation (ST). This study is to explore the impacts of directionality on the disfluency of bilateral ST between English and Chinese, with the purpose of finding out the correlation between them. The author adopts four disfluency indicators, namely Silent Pause (SP), Filled Pause (FP), Repetition (Rt), and Repair (Rr) to answer questions: What are the features of disfluency in ST in two directions? What is the correlation between directionality and disfluency in ST? 17 interpreting major students of comparable standard as subjects completed both E-C and C-E ST experiments. The results show that: (1) The incidence of SP is the highest in both E-C and C-E ST, followed by FP, then Rr, and finally Rt; many student interpreters do the basic pre-task preparation poorly, leading to a large number of SPs; lots of SPs coincide with respiration and those over 10 seconds occur only in E-C ST; (2) There are no statistically significant differences between E-C and C-E ST in terms of the four disfluency indicators, i.e., directionality exerts no significant effect on the disfluency of student interpreters’ ST.