earticle

영어

This study explores the causes of prolonged in-sentence pauses in English into Korean simultaneous interpretation. Pauses are one of the most tangible indexes that show the efficiency of interpreters’ information processing. Since professional interpreters instinctively try to avoid long pauses in their simultaneous interpretation, prolonged in-sentence pauses in their interpretation demonstrate their processing is suffering for unknown reasons. A computer-aided analysis of English into Korean simultaneous interpretation on TV showed that most of the long in-sentence pauses were located in the first half of the interpreted Korean sentences. Original English sentences that resulted in prolonged in-sentence pauses in interpretation were syntactically more complex than those that produced no long pause sentences. The EVS/length of English sentence ratios also demonstrated that interpreters began their interpretation too early for long and complex English sentences. The results reveal that the main cause of the prolonged pauses in interpretation is impaired understanding of incoming English sentence by the interpreter. Recommendations for avoiding these pauses included adjusting EVS according to the length of original incoming sentence and producing several short target sentences instead of long ones with prolonged in-sentence pauses.