A Study Of The Relation Between The Note-taking Language And The Fluency Of Interpretation For Student Interpreters During English-Chinese Consecutive Interpretation

Based on the Efforts Model and the Relevance Theory, the thesis analyses the relationship, for student interpreters, between the language of note-taking during English-Chinese consecutive interpretation and the fluency of the interpretation.The Efforts Model holds that consecutive interpretation comprises four concurrent processes:listening and analysis, note-taking, short-term memory operations and coordination. They all compete for the limited mental power of interpreters. The Relevance Theory holds that the best relevance should involve the least processing efforts and achieve the most positive effect. That is to say, using the least effort in note-taking to create the most positive relevance between the notes and the production. Meanwhile, the author summarize previous experiments with particular attention paid to the difference in their experiments’conclusions. The author holds that the obvious difference in the previous experiments’results are due to too many variables existing during their experiments and the variables caused errors. Therefore, the author limits the scope of study to reduce variables and the experiment focuses no more on the relationship between the note-taking language and the quality of interpretation as a whole, but studies the relationship between the note-taking language and the fluency of interpretation during English-Chinese consecutive interpretation.The author puts forward the assumption that during English-Chinese consecutive interpretation, using the target language can help increase the fluency of their production, for student interpreters.To prove the assumption, the author conducted an experiment, where six students were invited to interpret the speech whose theme is chosen by the six students on consensus. All the six students have been studying consecutive interpretation for one year and a half and they have similar learning experience and grades. The chosen speech doesn’t comprise any proper nouns. After the experiment, the author collected the data to analyze the relationship between the language of their note-taking and the fluency of their interpretation. The author made quantitative and qualitative analysis (including horizontal and vertical comparison) and carried out an interview to complement the analysis.Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the experiment shows a clear positive correlation between using the target language to take notes and the fluency of their interpretation.