An Empirical Study On Note-taking Strategies And Effects In E-C Consecutive Interpreting

Interpretation has received increasing attention in recent years, but most of the research attention has been given to Simultaneous Interpretation-related issues, and little attention has been given to note taking strategy. Even it is related to note taking, it always concentrates on what interpreters'notes should look like, but rather on what they actually look like. Moreover, most empirical studies are carried out among student interpreters or language learners, rather than expert interpreters. Therefore, the present study attempts to find out the actual note-taking habits of expert interpreters and discuss different note-taking strategies and effects between expert interpreters and student interpreters, thus providing advice and suggestion to future interpretation teaching and training.Subjects of the study consist of 6 expert interpreters with at least 3 years'working experience in conference interpretation and 6 student interpreters receiving at least 1 academic year's training in Consecutive Interpretation. Four hypotheses about note-taking strategies and effects between two groups of subjects have been proposed as following: (1) expert interpreters may have fewer notes than student interpreters; (2) expert interpreters may take more notes in Chinese, while student interpreters may take more notes in English; (3) expert interpreters may take more notes in symbol than language-based units, while student interpreters may take more notes in language; (4) expert interpreters'notes may be more effective than those of student interpreters in the aspect of source-text fidelity of the ensuring target text. The study procedures include: (1) pre-experiment questionnaires aimed to define the research subjects and investigate subjects'note-taking habits; (2) subjects interpreting a short passage separately and their performances were recorded by MP3; (3) collecting notes after experiment and transcribing target texts.Based on detailed statistic and descriptive analysis, hypothesis (1), (2) and (4) have been proved; correlations among total note units, language-based note unit and symbol note units have been discovered; difficulties that the student interpreters encountered in this task have been found out, such as: not retaining the beginning and the end of the speech properly; not knowing what to note and taking too much notes without adequate analysis of the speech structure. Moreover, with the help of Carroll's Information Processing System and Gile's Effort Model of CI, explanations have been given to the difference of performances between expert group and student group. For example, expert interpreters tend to filter out valuable information and encode it with meaningful segments, while student interpreters tend to take down what they hear without selecting; expert interpreters allocate proper efforts to each task involved, while student interpreters'effort distribution is not balanced; student interpreters tend to take notes in a micro- approach, while expert interpreters do it in a macro- approach; expert interpreters are analyzing the information initially while taking notes, while student interpreters concentrate more on remembering rather than comprehending and analyzing; expert interpreters are deeper in the degree of automitization than student interpreters.According to what has been discussed above, advice and suggestion have been given to future interpreting teaching and training. First and foremost, meaning takes priority in note-taking and the form or choice of language has secondary importance. Second, student interpreters should be taught to discard the form of the source text, and concentrate on extracting and analyzing the meaning of the text. Third, student interpreters should be trained to have a powerful memory, knowing and remembering the line of argument in the source text. This can be improved through intensive fast reading and retelling the source text without the help of notes. Fifth, student interpreters should be familiar with some conventional expressions of various topics, and store them in long-term memory in order to be recalled in any time, thus a lot of efforts will be saved in note-taking. This pilot study may serve as a reference for future larger-scale researches.