An Empirical Study Of Effect Of Speech Rate On Note-taking And Interpreting Quality

Note-taking is an indispensable auxiliary in consecutive interpreting,helping interpreters reduce the burden of short-term memory and organize the ideas to be delivered.However,note-taking is also a necessary evil,for it consumes already limited human attention and interpreting quality even deteriorates because of over-dependence on notes.What’s more,speech rate adds to the uncertainty of interpreting performance.Previous studies have explored notes from different aspects,but few studies focus on how speed affects note-taking during consecutive interpreting.In view of the significance of notetaking as well as the frequency of high-rate speeches,this empirical study is conducted to explore the influence of speech rate on note-taking and interpreting quality.In the light of Daniel Gile’s Effort Model,this empirical study puts forward two hypotheses.The first one goes as,“when speech rate increases,interpreters tend to take fewer notes;the fewer interpreters write down,the better interpreting quality will be”,and the second one goes as,“when speech rate increases,interpreters incline to take notes in source language;the higher the percentage of SL notes,the better interpreting quality will be.” To verify these two hypotheses,twenty participants have been recruited to interpret three English speeches(120 wpm,165 wpm and 200 wpm respectively)into Chinese.With reference to their notes and recordings,the influence of speed on notes and performance will be thoroughly observed and analyzed.To add up notes more conveniently,notes in this study will be grouped into numbers,source language notes,target language notes and symbols.Results show that as long as speech accelerates,note quantity of 18 interpreters decreases when speed goes up gradually from 120 wpm to 200 wpm but decreasing quantity of notes does not bring about better interpreting performance when speech accelerates.For the second hypothesis,19 participants use more SL notes when speech increases from 120 wpm to 165 wpm and 15 of them show their SL notes ratio is higher than 30%;while 18 interpreters share a higher SL ratio when speech accelerates from 120 wpm to 200 wpm and 16 of them write down over 30% SL notes;however,when speech runs over165 wpm,higher speed does not exert significant influence on percentage of SL notes;besides,SL notes proportion will not directly affect interpreting quality in any experiment.Therefore,results of the experiments fail to verify any hypothesis.Data analysis of this study shows that fewer interpreting notes or higher percentage of SL notes would not directly improve performance.Interpreters may not improve interpreting performance only through taking fewer notes or using more SL notes.Therefore,this study suggests that interpreters had better form their own note-taking systems to cope with rising speech rate during interpreting practices.