International Conference on Linguistic Research and Applications

Abstract
This study examines the critical role of pause length and positioning in consecutive and simultaneous
interpretation between Chinese and Portuguese. Through empirical analysis of
20 professional interpreters and 40 native Portuguese listeners, we investigated how inappropriate pause
distribution within sentence structures disrupts meaning transmission and comprehension. Prosodic
features, including pause patterns, are essential to meaning construction in both Chinese and Portuguese.
In Chinese, pauses often delineate semantic units and help disambiguate meaning in the absence of explicit
grammatical markers (Tseng, 2006). In Portuguese, prosodic phrasing influences syntactic parsing and
pragmatic interpretation (Frota & Vigário, 2003). When interpreters introduce pauses that do not align
with target language prosodic expectations, listeners may erroneously segment the incoming speech
stream, resulting in miscomprehension (Seeber, 2017). This is particularly problematic when interpreting
between languages with different prosodic systems, as between Chinese and Portuguese.
Our findings reveal that the typological distance between Chinese (an isolating, tonal language with
topic-prominence) and Portuguese (an inflectional, stress-timed language with subject- prominence)
creates unique challenges for interpreters. Results indicate that inappropriately positioned pauses occurring
at syntactically incorrect junctures result in meaning fragmentation, with a significant negative correlation
between inappropriate pause placement and listener comprehension. Passages containing more than five
inappropriate pauses per minute showed a bigger reduction in comprehension accuracy. These findings
have substantial implications for diplomatic, business, and legal interpretation contexts and provide
evidence- based recommendations for interpretation training programs