Difficulty Analysis Of The Note-Taking Process In Consecutive Interpretation With The English-Chinese Language Combination And An Exploration For A Note-Structure Solution In Training

The research on consecutive interpretation and note-taking in the process of consecutiveinterpretation has always been an important part of conference interpreting research. Aftermany years' practice, the interpretation community agrees on a set of principles of the notetakingstructure. However, in the one year as a professional conference interpreter and aninterpretation instructor for beginner students, the author discovered that the currentconsecutive interpretation note-taking structure based mainly on the experience derivedfrom the interpretation work within the European languages lacks attention to some of thespecial difficulties that conference interpreters with the English-Chinese languagecombination encounter in their practice. Therefore, this thesis first aims at finding out thesedifficulties by conducting a survey among a number of professional conference interpreterswith the English-Chinese language combination. An amended structure was designed basedon the experience of the author and some other conference interpreters after the difficultieswere identified by the survey results. The author then explored the efficacy of this amendedstructure in improving performance of student interpreters.There have been two conflicting ideas on the role of note-taking in consecutiveinterpretation training. One holds that note-taking plays a very small role and it is anegligible tool, and the other simply equates the training for consecutive interpretation withnote-taking training. Believing that the two ideas are both exaggerated, the author holdsthat in the teaching process of consecutive interpretation, learning from the teachers'experience will reduce the "ease-in" period for the students and help them formulate anorderly note-taking system of their own.According to Daniel Gile's "effort model" of consecutive interpretation, "processingcapacity" is needed for note-taking and note-reading in both of the two phases ofconsecutive interpretation. Given that the "processing capacity" for an interpreter isconstant within a certain period of time, the improvement in note structure will result in more assigned "processing capacity" in other aspects of the interpretation effort andconsequently lead to better interpretation performance.Based on this theory, a teaching experiment was carried out to compare the performance ofstudent interpreters before and after the learning of the designed structure and find out theeffectiveness of the structure in improving the students' interpretation performance. Theresult of the experiment showed that a better note structure helped them to reduce workload and improve performance, assuming that the understanding and analytical capacityand short-term memory of the students remained unchanged within a certain period of time.In the meantime, the result also showed that student interpreters can benefit from the"experience" of professional interpreters. Admittedly, a good note structure can neverreplace the training in understanding and analytical capacity as well as short-term memory;however, the improved structure can serve as an important supplementary tool and helpstudent interpreters to enhance their performance in consecutive interpretation.