Research On Relations Among Memory, Note-taking And Psychological Factors

As China's reform and opening up develop by leaps and bounds, its demand for competent interpreters becomes great than ever before, and the need for studies on interpretation theories and research is also more urgent than ever before.There are two basic modes of interpretation, namely, consecutive interpretation and simultaneous interpretation. If the interpreter interprets between chunks of the source speech, he is doing consecutive interpretation.When the interpreter is interpreting consecutively, he is listening, understanding, noting things down, reading notes, analyzing ideas and interpreting. All of these actions seem so quick in performance that they require interpreter's good memory and endurance of great pressure.Nowadays, consecutive interpretation is widely used in lectures, political talks, business meetings and news conferences. In view of the importance of memory and psychological factors that are involved in the work of the interpreter, it is necessary to pay more attention to research in the development of the interpreter's memory capacity and psychological factors.The whole thesis consists of five parts. In the first chapter, I introduced current situation and trends in interpretation studies First of all, it gives an introduction of note-taking as a tool to help memorizing, the significance of taking notes as well as notes as psychological regulator which has been overlooked by many researchers and experts. In the second chapter, it gives an introduction and the definitions of anxiety, the source of anxiety, memory and the Gile's Effort Model which is applied as the theoretical foundation of interpretation research. The third chapter introduces three types of memory, that is, sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory as well as the relations between these three types memory and note-taking. In the fourth chapter, a small-scale investigation is reported, in which eight postgraduates major in translation from Foreign Language School of Soochow University are invited as participants to do consecutive interpretation in my experiment. the interpreters were divided into two groups and received different directions when doing the interpretation. The present author collects all the notes of the interpreters'and make detailed analysis on them so as to study the relations among memory, note-taking and psychological factors. Last but not the least, the relations are found to be reflected from the notes of all the interpreters. And based on this finding a few personal suggestions on improving the quality of interpretation are put forward.It is gratifying to find that an increasing number of people have devoted themselves to interpretation and interpretation training. Interpretation training is thus believed to have a promising future. The author sincerely hopes that this effort can provide some valuable suggestions for interpretation teaching.