A Study On The Difference In Working Memory And Note-taking Concision Between High-level And Low-level Consecutive Interpreters

As an important form of interpretation, there is a great demand of consecutive interpreting in today's society. Training highly qualified consecutive interpreters with efficient methods will promote the communication between different countries and regions in politics, economy, military affairs, culture and society, thereby accelerating the development of the world. It shows us that both the practice and study of consecutive interpreting are of great importance. Previous researchers have conducted a large number of studies on consecutive interpreting, which, with various research focuses, adopted different research methods and yielded lots of fruitful results. However, the study on consecutive interpreting has not been mature yet. There are still many shortcomings and much improvable space in this field. Within the framework of the Effort Model proposed by Gile, the influence factors of consecutive interpreting were studied in this paper. Working memory and note-taking concision were the two key factors chosen for examining. Empirical study was conducted to figure out whether working memory and note-taking concision have influence on consecutive interpreting.The subjects of this paper are the interpreting major postgraduate students who are in their second year. The relation between working memory and consecutive interpreting and the relation between note-taking concision and consecutive interpreting were examined in this paper. Specifically, there are three research questions in this paper:(1) Is there any difference between the high-level and low-level consecutive interpreters in working memory span?(2) Is there any difference between the high-level and low-level consecutive interpreters in note-taking concision?(3) For high-level and low-level consecutive interpreters, can their working memory and note-taking concision predict their consecutive interpreting quality?The collected data were analyzed with SPSS 13.0. The main results are as follows: First, there is no significant difference between high-level and low-level consecutive interpreters in working memory. Second, there is significant difference between high- level and low- level consecutive interpreters in note-taking concision. Third, there is no predictive power of working memory to consecutive interpreting quality for either high-level or low- level consecutive interpreters; however, there is significant predictive power of note-taking concision to consecutive interpreting quality, which predicts 40.2% of interpreting variance for high-level consecutive interpreters and 50.3% for low-level ones.