The Study Of Language Choice In Note-Taking In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpretation

For rookie consecutive-interpreters, note-taking has been a difficult skill to acquire. This thesis aims to help address this difficulty by exploring the language choice (between source language and target language) in note-taking. Former studies on this subject have focused on the external determinants for language choices in consecutive interpreting. There are mainly two of them:the statues of the given language in the interpreter's language combination, and the statues of the given language in the interpreting task. But this thesis will revisit this subject from a different angle:instead of looking at the common factors governing interpreters'language choice, the focus will be placed on individual interpreters in deciding the relationship between the difficulty level of the source text and interpreters'tendency to choose a given language in note-taking.Based on Daniel Gile's effort model, two assumptions have been made in this thesis: the more difficult the source text is, the greater the tendency of the interpreter to take note in source language; if mental power permits, active choice of target language in note-taking makes for greater fluency in production.To substantiate the two assumptions, I've conducted an experiment on six students who all have received one year and a half of professional interpretation training. In the first part of the experiment, each of the students has interpreted three portions (with escalating difficulty levels, which is simplified as the speed of the speech for the sake of the experiment) of the same speech. With their assistance, I've read their notes to count the number of source language characters and target language characters. In the second part of the experiment, each student has been asked to interpret two portions of the same speech set at very low difficulty levels, and do their best to take note in source language and target language respectively. Then a comparison has been made between the two translations. The results of the two experiments (or one experiments made of two parts) validate my assumptions. At the end of the thesis, advises based on the experiment results will be provided for interpreter learners.