Note-taking Problems And Countermeasures In Consecutive Interpreting

Note-taking occupies an important position in consecutive interpreting. It helps relievethe memory of interpreters and provide them with the key information and a clear structureof the original speech. However, note-taking should be viewed from the right perspective.That is to say, students need to learn about the three basic principles of consecutiveinterpreting, namely understanding, analyzing and re-expressing before they concentrate onnote-taking. If these stages are not done correctly, even the best note in the world won’tmake a good interpreter.After learning the basic principles of consecutive interpreting, detailed note-takingtechniques are discussed in the second chapter. Most of these skills have been drawn fromexperiences of professional interpreters. They serve as guidelines or references, not hardand fast rules. The general idea and framework of these two chapters have been muchadapted from Conference Interpreting Explained by Roderick Jones, a very inspiring andinstructive book on consecutive interpreting.Based on the introductions and discussions so far, an empirical study of the MTIstudents of College of Foreign Languages in Jilin University comes into being. The purposeof the experiment is to see whether the general guidelines, those that have been talked aboutin the previous chapters, are employed in students’ note-taking and to find out theirpersistent note-taking problems, if there’s any. To be specific, it covers mainly three areas:the content of the notes, the layout of the notes and the use of symbols and abbreviations inthe notes. The experiment differs with the traditional studies in that it selects a speechsegment including many names, lists, dates and numbers as the experiment material,because these items are often hard to store in memory and must be included in the note.Through a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis on the experiment result,persistent problems on the three aspects of note-taking mentioned above are identified.These problems, on the one hand, are independent from each other. On the other hand,however, they are closely connected. Therefore, countermeasures are not put forward toovercome the problems one by one as with the traditional case. Instead, the author of the paper makes an attempt from the macro and micro perspectives. These countermeasures aresuggested to help solve the problems and improve the overall situation of note-taking.This paper mentions few theories on interpreting and translating. Instead it contains alarge number of examples, note-taking details and experiment explanations, which is ofsignificant importance to MTI study.