| Note-taking plays an important role in consecutive interpretation, in ways that it helps release the working memory burden and recall the information in the interpreting process. It is also thought to be highly personalized, with unique styles and points of focus on the part of the taker. But will there be any change to note-taking when the source speech is delivered at high rates? And how will that influence the interpretation quality? Those are the questions this paper seeks to answer.Through an empirical study on how note-taking is influenced by high speech rates, the paper looks into the changing characteristics of note-taking. It analyzes those changes using Daniel Gile’s effort model for consecutive interpretation and the interview results from the subjects of the experiment. By summarizing the changes and their impacts on the interpreting performance, the author proposes some ideas on how to respond to high speech rate contextInterpreters may encounter various uncontrollable elements that wi affect their interpreting performance, and high speech rate is one of them. The author hopes that this paper may inspire student interpreters to find out ways to cope with such situation.Four points of conclusion are made in this paper. First, the priority in student interpreters’ note-taking at high speech rate is point of information instead of logic relationships. This leads to less consistent of the interpretatioa Second, at high speech rate, there are no obvious redundancies in the student interpreters’note-taking. At the same time, because of fewer points of information and logic remarks taken, the efficiency of the notes decreases. Third, at high speech rate, information memorized by the brain outperforms those by note-taking than it does at normal speech rate in terms of efficiency. Fourth, at high speech rate, more efforts are made to note-taking. This leads to imbalance of effort coordination and finally lower interpretation fidelity. |
PDF Full Text Request