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Fluency is an important, yet insufficiently understood, construct in interpreting studies. This article reports on an empirical study which explored the relationship between utterance fluency measures and raters' perceived fluency ratings of English/Chinese consecutive interpreting. It also examined whether such relationship was consistent across interpreting directions and rater types. The results partially supported the categorization of utterance fluency into breakdown, speed and repair fluency. It was also found that mean length of unfilled pauses, phonation time ratio, mean length of run and speech rate had fairly strong correlations with perceived fluency ratings in both interpreting directions and across rater types. Among a number of competing regression models that were built to predict raters' fluency ratings, a parsimonious model, using mean length of unfilled pauses and mean length of run as predictors, accounted for about 60% of the variance of fluency ratings in both directions and across rater types. These results are expected to help create, rewrite and modify rubrics and scalar descriptors of fluency scales in rater-mediated interpretation assessment and to inform automated scoring of fluency in interpreting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to look closely at the achievement of coherence in interpreting through the prism of metadiscourse, a set of grammatical resources instrumental in organizing a discourse, guiding the recipients towards an author/speaker’s preferred interpretation while taking account of their needs and expectation. Despite a general consensus on the role of the umbrella term, opinions vary on what falls under it. Further, while the conception sets an illuminating framework for empirical endeavors to delve into the way in which meaning is negotiated and represented at discoursal level, its discussion is often confined to the analysis of written text in specific genre (e.g. academic treatise), leaving its role in oral discourse scarcely explored. In this paper, we propose an adapted taxonomy for the analysis of devices as such in interpretation and relate them to the building of coherence in interpreted events. Qualitative analysis of instances from real-life situations is then presented to show that successful communication in interpreting does not only come as a result of rendering the propositional message, but also involves a process of skillfully managing various metadiscoursal devices in reconstructing intertextual and intratextual conherences, both of which serve the same communicative goal with neither enjoying precedence over the other. The proposed taxonomy of metadiscourse may have some pedagogical and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]