An Empirical Study Of Student Interpreters’ Note-taking Features And The Relationship With CI Performance

Consecutive Interpreting (CI) is a major form in interpreting and in informationtransmitting, while note-taking is one basic skill and indispensable part in CI. Properuse of note-taking skill can help the interpreter store the information of sourcelanguage effectively; improve the efficiency and quality of the interpreters ininformation retrieving and target language expressing. However, most researches onnote-taking concentrate on introducing, describing and evaluating note-taking in CI, orproposing some principles, highlights and conventional symbols for note-taking.There are few empirical studies on note taking, in which subjects are mostly confinedto professional interpreters and undergraduate English majors.This empirical study aims to reveal the features of student interpreters innote-taking, the correlation between interpreting quality and three parameters in notes’features, and discover some relevant factors influencing note-taking. Five juniorundergraduate English majors, five MTI first-year interpreting majors, and five MTIsecond-year interpreting majors have been selected to take part in the experiment. Byinstruments of note-taking check and interpreting test, an questionnaire and aninterview, the study bears the purpose of providing meaningful guidance for studentinterpreters to improve the interpreting quality. The study has reached the followingconclusions:1) As a result of different interpreting practice and training, studentinterpreters in different groups display different features in note-taking;2)There existsa certain correlation between the interpreting quality and the features of notes. To bemore specific, the quantity and language of notes has little relevance to the CIperformance, and the form of notes is strongly relevant to the interpreting quality,especially when the material for interpreting is long and with fast speed. The higherthe qualities of symbols and English abbreviations in notes are, the higher theinterpreting efficiency will be.3) Note-taking skill of the student interpreters will alsobe affected by other factors including language skills, psychological conditions and soon. Therefore, student interpreters should adopt relevant strategies to improve theirnote-taking skills, thus improving the overall quality of interpreting.