Disfluency in relay and non-relay simultaneous interpreting: An initial exploration
Song, S., & Cheung, K. F. A. (2019). Disfluency in relay and non-relay simultaneous interpreting: An initial exploration. FORUM (Netherlands), 17(1), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.18016.che
Abstract
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.
