Note-taking Choices And Interpreting Performance Of Student Interpreters In Consecutive Interpreting

Interpreting is a challenging and complex language processing task.Since the study of interpreting was established as an independent field of research in the mid-1970s,there has been a great deal of interest in revealing the processing activities in interpreters’ minds while performing this task.As a prominent feature of consecutive interpreting(CI),note-taking can indicate important cognitive infonnation in the process of interpreting and provide a unique perspective for observing this process.This empirical study aims to observe the note-taking characteristics of student interpreters,explore the motivation behind the phenomena,and to reveal the influence of note-taking on interpreting quality.In this study,empirical data is collected from simultaneous recording of video and voice,note-taking samples,questionnaire,and retrospective interviews.The research then presents a theoretical and methodological discussion on real note-taking samples from the perspective of cognitive load.This study is divided into five chapters.The first part of the introduction briefly introduces the research background and research significance.The second part is the literature review.This part mainly reviews the previous studies of CI notes from the streams of prescriptive and descriptive research,identifies the key variables such as the form of notes(including language or symbol and abbreviations or full word)and the language of notes(including the source language or target language,and the A language or the B language),as well as illustrates the previous findings of the relationship between note-taking and interpreting performance.On the basis of prior studies,this study analyzes student interpreters’ CI notes from the perspective of cognitive load.The third part is the research plan,which describes the research methods,experimental design and experimental procedures in detail.The fourth part presents the experimental data from the main aspects of note composition,the cognitive load and the relationship between note-taking and interpreting performance,and statistics are further analyzed and discussed.The fifth part summarizes the major findings,puts forward feasible suggestions for interpreting training and note-taking teaching for student interpreters,and reflects on the innovation and shortcomings of this study.This study observes the note-taking and interpreting process of 21 MTI students majoring in interpretation.The experimental data shows that student interpreters generally prefer language to symbols,the source language to the target language,and abbreviation to word in note-taking.However,the relationship between interpreting notes and interpreting performance is more complicated than expected.The data from this study show that there is no significant correlation between interpreting performance and interpreting notes when translating from Chinese to English.However,in the E-C direction,more notes and less target language lead to better interpreting performance.This is because the cognitive load is larger for student interpreters when interpreting from English to Chinese even if the souree speech in English and in Chinese are of similar difficulty and topic,which will affect the note-taking choices of the interpreter and further affect the interpreting performance.This study adopts the combination of result analysis and process analysis,uses intelligent equipment to carry out the experiment,and analyzes experimental data through software,including CPIDR and SPSS 24.0,in order to further improve the accuracy and objectivity of the study.However,limitations also exist in this study.For example,the sample size is not large enough.The analysis of interpretation notes should be more comprehensive.And the cognitive load can only be measured subjectively due to the limit of the equipment.However,the drawbacks also point out the direction for future research.In the follow-up in-depth research,attention should be paid to the improvement of experimental methods,the precision and the objectification of data measurement so as to strengthen the accuracy of experimental results.