The (inter)subjectivity of silent pauses in consecutive interpreting

This presentation reports on an empirical study on the perception of silent pauses in consecutive interpreting by analysing three native Dutch speakers and nine native Dutch or bilingual raters. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the distinction between disruptive and functional silent pauses and to contribute to the methodology of fluency analysis by trying to establish a more valid and sound minimum cut-off point for silent pauses. A wide consensus was found among the raters as regards the perception of disruptive silent pauses and two separate thresholds, 1.40s for grammatical pauses and of 0.56s for non-grammatical pauses, are proposed. These cut-off points are higher than the thresholds that up until now have been used, but the results suggest that a higher threshold might provide higher reliability.