Influence Of Note-taking Skills On E-C Consecutive Interpreting Performance

In recent years, Chinese interpreting researchers and trainees have begun to focus their attention on the enhancement of interpreting quality. Note-taking is a very important technique in interpreting. Chinese scholars have made research into this issue from different perspectives. However, compared with western countries, the academic study of note-taking techniques in China still has much room for further development. As such, this thesis makes an initial effort to study the influence of note-taking (NT) skills on consecutive interpreting (CI) performance, on the basis of Gile's Effort Model of consecutive interpreting, through an empirical study.Chapter One reviews relevant literatures on consecutive interpreting and notes, especially on the processing capacity consumption of note-taking in consecutive interpreting within the framework of Gile's Effort Model. It looks into the role, the process and the components of NT in CI.Chapter Two and Chapter Three are the empirical study and results analyses. The experiment includes an on-the-spot English to Chinese consecutive interpreting and the questionnaire. The experiment results, including the interpreting tape-recordings, the notes taken down during the experiment and the questionnaires, testify the direct relationship between NT skills of the subjects and their CI performances.The conclusion part first summarizes the major findings of this study: 1) NT skills are related to CI performance; 2) the relevance of NT skills to CI performance diminishes when NT skills have reached a certain level; 3) the lack of an effective note-taking system tends to cause problems and errors in reproduction; 4) inappropriate allocation of attention during note-taking is very likely to lead to inefficient notes and eventually undermine the quality of reproduction. It then discusses the implications and the methodological limitations of this study and makes suggestions for further study.