Information Filtering And Selecting By Note-taking In Consecutive Interpretation

In Consecutive Interpretation (CI), the interpreter is under the pressure of informationabsorbing, decoding and reproducing. Therefore, note-taking is an important part to helpalleviate the memory burden of the interpreter and enhance the CI performance.Since a person's memory capacity and the time for note-taking are both limited, not allinformation can be taken down by notes. Thus, a note which could effectively filtrate andselect information is of great importance for the holistic CI performance. In light of this, thisthesis attempts to illustrate the information filtering and selecting function of note-taking andthe relation between this function and CI performance through empirical studies.The theoretical foundations of this thesis are: the 'Filter Theory' of Donald E. Broadbent andthe 'Information Processing System' of David W. Carroll. On the basis of these theories andprevious researches made by Daniel Gile, Wilhelm K. Weber and Liu Minghua, the mainhypothesis is raised:Note-taking in CI serves as a filter to filtrate the unimportant signals and select the keyinformation most pertinent to the reproduction of the original meaning in a logical way. Thisfunction is closely related with CI performance. The notes that can more effectively filter andselect information have more positive effect on CI performance.The methodology adopted in this research is experimental. It works on the basis of anexperiment among senior English major postgraduates of UIBE. 20 subjects are selected tointerpret consecutively an English speech into Chinese. There are 50 propositions and 180lexical units in the selected speech. The interpretations of the subjects are recorded and theirnotes are checked afterwards. For all their CI and note-taking performances, the scores aremeasured by the number and percentage of propositions correctly interpreted in CI and takendown on notes, and the number and percentage of lexical units correctly interpreted in CI andtaken down on notes. Through a detailed analysis at both propositional level and lexical levelon these data and the comparisons of these indexes in an all-around way, the informationfiltering and selecting function of note-taking are testified to find out the relation between thisfunction and CI performance.The significance of the thesis is: as only a few studies have been made on note-taking of CIwith 'Filter Theory', the current study can help to clarify and highlight the functions ofinformation filtering and selecting in note-taking, so as to improve the interpreters'understanding of note-taking strategies and better facilitate their CI performances. The resultsof the study have practical significance for the practice and training of CI interpreters.