The Relevance Between Note-taking Features And Interpreting Quality: An Empirical Report On Trainee Interpreters' Note-taking

Noting-taking has been considered a significant aid to consecutive interpreting.As an experimental report,this paper intends to find out the relationship between the notes and the quality of interpreting in Chinese-English interpretation.This experiment is designed to answer three research questions: 1.Which of the two languages are the trainee interpreters inclined to use for CI note-taking? 2.Does good command of noting-taking ability lead to good interpreting quality for trainee interpreters? 3.Which one of the features of note-taking plays a fundamental role that leads to good interpreting quality?The hypotheses of the experiment are as follows: 1.Trainee interpreters are more likely to take notes in Chinese than English.2.Trainee interpreters who have a good command of note-taking ability attain higher scores on interpreting quality.3.Deverbalization of the source text of note-taking plays a fundamental role that leads to good interpreting quality.The experiment has selected 15 second-year MTI trainee interpreters' notes and recorded their interpreting performances.The notes are classified as Chinese,English,deverbalized notes,symbols,and unrecognizable notes.To address the first research question,the author compares the numbers taken in the form of each category.To address research question two and three,the proportion of each category of the notes from 15 students are calculated.The author invites two judges to score the students' notes according to Rozan' s Seven Principles for Note-taking in Consecutive Interpreting and the students' interpreting quality according to the Assessment Criteria for Interpreting Modules of the University of Leeds.The data has been processed by SPSS(Statistic Package for Social Science)to find out the relevance.The conclusion is that trainee interpreters are inclined to take notes in Chinese in CE interpreting and take notes with symbol and abbreviation in EC interpreting,a good command of noting-taking ability gets good quality of interpretation,and the deverbalization of source text and links play the fundamental roles that lead to good interpreting quality.