An Empirical Inquiry Of Note-Taking Difficulties Perceived By Interpreting Students In E-C Consecutive Interpreting

Note-taking (NT) plays an irreplaceable role in consecutive interpreting (CI). However, instead of being an effective tool for interpreting students to retrieve information from memory, it is still a barrier in the early stage of their learning. Obviously, finding answers to the NT difficulties of the students will help learners get a better idea of how to take notes more efficiently and make a better use of it in interpreting. This thesis is aimed at exploring the NT difficulties Chinese interpreting students come across and factors causing these difficulties in E-C CI through an empirical study.This study adopts the investigating tools "stimulated recall" and semi-structured interview employed by Xu Hanming and Chai Mingjiong(徐海铭&柴明颎,2008) in their empirical study on NT difficulties to collect data. Eight postgraduate students majoring in English with interpretation as their research focus participated in this empirical study in which they interpreted four English passages with distinct features. The data are collected by transcribing the video and audio recording of their interpreting, the stimulated recalls, the semi-structured interviews and notes. Based on Gile’s Effort Model, the data are closely studied and analyzed. The major findings of the study--the NT difficulties perceived by students in E-C CI are:difficulty in choosing the right words; difficulty in choosing symbols to be written down; difficulty in noting down information; difficulty in streamlining notes; difficulty in reflecting text logic in notes; difficulty in deciphering notes; confusing symbols with others. And among these difficulties, the most frequently reported difficulties are the difficulty in reflecting text logic in notes, the difficulty in noting down information and the difficulty in deciphering notes in the production phase. And the possible factors behind these difficulties include complex sentence structures, high information density, insufficient memory capacity, unskilled NT techniques, unbalanced allocation of efforts and disturbance of the subjects’own language ability and psychology.Therefore, to solve these problems, students should improve their English proficiency, enhance memory training, receive rigorous NT training and achieve NT automatization. And they also should learn to strike a balance among different efforts in CI and read more to have more encyclopedic knowledge.