Does Note-taking Help To Improve Accuracy Of Numbers In Simultaneous Interpretation

Numbers usually cause interpreters difficulties in simultaneous interpretation. Traditional coping strategies such as referring to written materials, seeking help from boothmates and shortening EVS are not always reliable in real life. The author thus conducted an experiment on the effectiveness of note-taking in helping to improve number accuracy in simultaneous interpretation, based on innovation and improvements in terms of test subjects, classification of numbers and experiment method over previous experiments on the same subject.The author first put the inherent difficulties of numbers in SI into the perspective of Daniel Gile's Effort Model and analyzed the plausibility of note-taking for numbers in SI. Citing results of lots of previous experiments, the author managed to prove theoretically any experiment aimed at testing the effectiveness of note-taking for numbers in SI is valid and meaningful only when conducted among experienced interpreters.The author thus randomly split 12 experienced simultaneous interpreters into Group A and B(note-taking is allowed only for Group B), tested them all on the same speech, transcribed their recordings and compared number performance of the two groups on all indicators used in this experiment.Statistical results show that, numbers do pose problems to interpreters, which is true regardless of availability of note-taking; numbers above 10000 is the most difficult type; omission is the most frequent type of number mistakes; while distracting interpreters, note-taking does greatly help improve number accuracy rates in SI; but note-taking has limited effect in improving overall accuracy rates for both numbers and non-numbers put together; note-taking seems most effective for four-digit numbers and above and it works best for reducing omissions; situations when note-taking works best also include when numbers appear in clusters like in an example and when large numbers are spread sparsely among passages; note-taking is not as effective for numbers when they appear in a cluster and the logic is complex; instead of improving number accuracy rates, note-taking reduces accuracy rates for numbers when small numbers appear sparsely in paragraphs.The author hopes these findings can provide input for future experiments on targeted number training for simultaneous interpretation and help simultaneous interpreters improve number accuracy rates in real life.