The Influence Of Speech Difficulty On Language Choice Of Note-taking In Consecutive Interpreting

Consecutive interpreting,as a significant form of interpreting,always receives much attention in the field of interpreting studies.Note-taking of consecutive interpreting is also a popular spot.Since the research results of interpreting textbooks and different empirical studies in and abroad are quite different,this research tries to discuss the language choices of professional interpreters and student interpreters both in English-to-Chinese consecutive interpreting(hereafter referred as “E-C consecutive interpreting”)and Chinese-to-English consecutive interpreting(hereafter referred as “C-E consecutive interpreting”),and also tries to compare the differences between professional interpreters and student interpreters in each occasion.All of these researches are based on Daniel Gile’s Effort Model of Consecutive Interpreting.The result of language choice will be described and discussed both from the perspective of “source language”(hereafter referred as “SL”)and “target language”(hereafter referred as “TL”),and the perspective of “Language A”(hereafter referred as “LA”)and “Language B”(hereafter referred as “LB”).The research began from the research question,“what languages does interpreters use in note-taking of consecutive interpreting”.Based on the data and research materials discovered by former researchers,the author found other seven student interpreters studied at the first or second year of English-Chinese Interpreting major.The author chooses four different speeches,including an English general speech,a Chinese general speech,an English technical speech and a Chinese technical speech as the materials of the experiment.The experiment is made online.Pictures of notes and the recordings are recorded by the author.It is found that,professional interpreters prefer to use “LA” when taking notes in consecutive interpreting of both language directions,prefer to use “TL” when doing EC consecutive interpreting,and prefer to use “SL” when doing C-E consecutive interpreting.As the difficulty of source speech increase,they reduce the percentage of LB(SL here)in E-C consecutive interpreting.They reduce the percentage of LA(SL here)and increase the percentage of LB(TL here)in C-E consecutive interpreting.However,student interpreters’ language of notes in both E-C consecutive interpreting and C-E consecutive interpreting have no obvious tendency.With the increase of difficulty of source speech,they prefer to use less LA(SL here)and more LB(SL here)in E-C consecutive interpreting,while there is no significant change in the percentage of language choice in notes in C-E consecutive interpreting.Based on different research directions,this research tries to describe the situation of language choice in note-taking of professional interpreters and student interpreters in both E-C consecutive interpreting and C-E consecutive interpreting,and tries to choose the real “student interpreters”(MTI students)as the actual subjects of the research experiment,which shows more rationality as to former researches.Moreover,great differences between English and Chinese would made the result of the research different from those related to other Western Languages,and will show more new facts in research fields.