Experimental Report Of Note-taking Strategies In Consecutive Interpreting With Speech Recognition Assistance

This thesis explores whether speech recognition can assist English-Chinese and Chinese-English interpreting under the conditions of the deliberately designed experiment,and what particular note-taking strategies can be most effective and helpful in consecutive interpreting with speech recognition assistance.Through the analysis of this experiment and collected data,it can be concluded that under the experimental conditions,speech recognition can assist both English-Chinese and Chinese-English interpreting in general,and more specifically,it can better facilitate Chinese-English interpreting than English-Chinese interpreting.In terms of note-taking strategies,interpreters with the aid of speech recognition should pay more attention to real-time speech recognition output texts and take fewer notes during the listening and analysis phase of English-Chinese interpreting.However,in other phases of both English-Chinese and Chinese-English interpreting,adopting different note-taking strategies has little impact on their performance.No note-taking,key-words note-taking,and traditional note-taking strategies are three options provided in the experiment to explore the most effective method during interpreting with the aid of speech recognition.Gile's Effort Model constitutes the theoretical basis of this thesis for different note-taking strategies trigger different types of allocation of the “mental energy”,considered a key factor influencing interpreters' performance.The speech recognition software adopted is “iFLYTEK IME application”,which can recognize English and Chinese speeches in real time.The eight subjects who participated in the experiment are all students in the Master of Translation and Interpreting(MTI)program,from the School of Foreign Languages for Business,Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.The interpreting materials adopted in the experiment were all selected from the supporting training materials of the official practice book for China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters(CATTI)Level 2.The scoring sheet used in this thesis was adapted from Yang Cheng-shu's “Interpreting Marking Sheet” to evaluate the performance of the subjects.Total scores were given at last.The experimental results show that speech recognition assisted interpreting has particular potential in the future interpreting market because it can improve the performance of translators.Therefore,it is necessary for interpreters and researchers to continuously explore and optimize note-taking strategies for speech recognition assisted interpreting.