Choice Of Language In Note-taking Of English-chinese Consecutive Interpreting-An Empirical Study Of Notes By Interpreting Trainees

Note-taking has been taken as a very important means to assist memory,facilitate production and improve performance in consecutive interpreting. However,no specific rules have been discovered as to the language used in CI note-taking. This empirical study aims to find out the choice of language in note-taking for English-Chinese consecutive interpreting based on an analysis of the notes taken by interpreting trainees from Taiwan and the Chinese Mainland.Seven Taiwanese interpreting trainees at post-graduate level from National Taiwan Normal University and Fu Jen University and seven Mainland interpreting trainees at the same level from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies participated in the study, all of whom have Chinese as their A language and English as their B language. They were asked to perform consecutive interpreting tasks with their renditions and post-experiment interviews recorded and notes collected for further analysis.The experiments findings showed that the two groups of interpreters did not exhibit the same language choice in their notes although they have the same language combination and process the same source language and target language in the interpreting task. In the discussion part, Gile’s Effort Model for Consecutive Interpreting is adopted to analyze the data and explore the causes for the respective choice of the language used in E-C CI note-taking. The conclusion is: There is dominance of neither source language nor target language in E-C CI note-taking. The main reason may be that the language chosen by interpreters in note-taking is also subject to influences such as the ease of writing and the trainings they have receivedin addition to the status of language in the interpreting task.