A Study On Note-taking Of Consecutive Interpretation From The Perspective Of The Schema Theory

Note taking, as a basic skill in English interpreting, plays an important role inreducing the burden of memory and activating the memory. Nowadays, there are manyways of taking notes but most of them have a great nature of individualism and lack asystematic theoretic guidance and way of practice, which makes the potentialinterpreters feel confused. In thesis, the author tries to analyze the several phases innote taking and tries to figure out the questions like preparation of note taking, what totake and how to take with the guidance of schema theory.The schema theory believes that when people receive new information, they firsttry to make connections between new information with the existed schema in theirmind. If the new information can activate the existed schema, people will react morequickly to the new information and if not, the reaction will slow down or baffled.When the new information is similar with the existed schema, the existed schema willbe more stable. Otherwise, the existed schema will adjust itself or even reconstruct aschema. This theory has many common with the note taking in consecutive interpreting.In taking notes, the interpreter also needs the help of schema to accelerate the speed ofreaction and improve the accuracy of new information.The interpreter should make a good preparation before note taking, including thepreparation of language schema, content schema, formal schema and strategy schema.The main job before note taking is the getting and comprehension of the cominginformation. The interpreter needs to understand the language, meaning, genre of thespeech and how to cope with the information. In taking note, what to note and how tonote are two big questions. The language schema and content schema can guide thequestion of what to note. The strategy schema can guide how to take note. After notetaking is reading notes. The interpreter reads the symbols representing definitemeaning and the hidden meaning in the notes with language schema and contentschema. Strategy schema deals with the problems of reading order and simplest signsreading.The author not only applies four types of schema but also applies the three modes:top-down processing, bottom-up processing and interactive processing. This thesiscombines the four types of schema and three modes to analyze the three phases of notetaking and provides guide to note taking practice.