A Study Of Note-taking In Consecutive Interpreting From The Perspective Of Effort Model

The consecutive interpreter listens to a significant passage or the totality of a speech in the source language,and then reconstitutes the speech in an accurate,complete and fluent manner with the help of notes taken while listening.According to Daniel Gile's Effort Model,there are two phases in consecutive interpreting:First,interpreting=L+N+M+C and second,interpreting=Rem+Read+P+C.Therefore,it can be seen that notes indeed play a pivotal role in consecutive interpreting.The research invites eight professional interpreters and eight non-professional interpreters as subj ects.The professionals include university interpreting teachers who are also interpreting practitioners,and freelance interpreters while the non-professionals are postgraduate students maj oring in English language and literature at SISU.Both groups are invited to interpret E-C and C-E general speeches as well as E-C and C-E technical speeches.Taking the Effort Model as a theoretical framework,the author compares and analyzes the characteristics of both groups' notes from the perspectives of when to note,quantity,language choice and symbols and abbreviations.In the meanwhile,a notes-related questionnaire is given to all subjects after the experiment so as to better explore the efficient ways of taking notes.The maj or findings of the research are:first,the professionals start taking notes as quickly as possible but only when they have understood.Second,the professionals use more notes than the non-professionals and there seems no correlation between the quantity of notes and the quality of interpreting.Third,the professionals use more target language notes in EC general and technical speeches but more source language notes in CE general and technical speeches.The non-professionals,however,use more source language notes in both general and technical speeches between EC and CE interpretation.The number of source language notes increases when they are faced with the technical speech.Last but not least,the professionals use more symbols and abbreviations than the non-professionals and increase the usage of them in technical speeches while the non-professionals witness a decrease of the usage in CE technical speech.The research also provides suggestions on note-taking practice from the aforementioned four aspects,which might be helpful for interpreting learners in note-taking practice.