The pattern of non-fluencies, often viewed as a major indicator of an interpreter’s fluency, has thus far received considerable attention from interpreting scholars. This exploratory study aims to investigate the effects of directionality on novice interpreters’ control of such features in a Chinese/English consecutive interpreting task. To do so, four main types of non-fluencies including silent pauses, filled pauses, repetitions and false starts were selected for the analysis. Our results confirm plausible directional effects on the novices’ production of non-fluencies, suggesting that interpreting into English produces a far greater number of total and individual non-fluencies than interpreting into Chinese. Furthermore, the study reveals a significant contrast: silent pauses exhibit longer durations in the non-native language compared to the native language. This contradicts the previous conclusions about directional effects on pausing behavior and highlights the influence of language-pair specific differences. The study underscores the importance of silent pauses in facilitating the delivery of interpreting, shedding light on the acquisition of fluency skills during interpreter training.
