Non-interpreting-major Students' Language Choice In Note-taking For Consecutive Interpreting

Successful CI depends largely on efficient NT. Yet prevailing studies of the latter mainly focus on personal skills and tactics, and empirical studies on language choice in NT constitute a comparatively small part.Furthermore, the current few research findings focus on professionals or interpreting-major students, which are an extremely limited population. Contrary to the situation above, there are thousands of English seniors or postgraduates who are engaged in interpretation learning; and who unfortunately have not received sufficient attention in the academic field corresponding to the impressive quantity. So the author intends to conduct a study on this huge population with an aim to fill this gap.Ten English major MA candidates from the College of Foreign Languages, Chongqing University, participate in this experiment. They are required to listen to the 4 test passages (2 Chinese and 2 English) with different difficulties, take notes and interpret them into target language according to their notes at the CI laboratory of the College. And their interpretation is recorded at the same time.These ten subjects are chosen out of the following three considerations. First, they are postgraduate candidates of English major, as advocated by AIIC that better language proficiency guarantees a favorable training outcome. Second, the subjects have just attended the course of INTERPRETATION: THEORY AND PRACTICE for one semester. It is assumed that they have generally mastered the basic knowledge and skills of CI. Last, all of them are highly interested in CI and actively involve themselves in autonomous CI practice habitually in order to pass certain interpreting test concerned.In the light of Information Processing Theory and Gile's Effort Model for CI, both quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis are used for illustrating, from the perspectives of memory, control process, automatic and controlled processes, processing capacity, top-down and bottom-up processes, and attention distribution, that interpreting task language (SL/TL), other than interpreters'language combination (A/B language), governs non-interpreting-major students'language choice in their notes for CI; that SL outnumbers TL with a significant difference; and that there is no significant correlation between language choice in NT and CI performance.