An Empirical Study Of Relevancy Between Features Of Note-Taking In C-E Consecutive Interpreting And Quality Of Interpretation

Under the joint efforts of scholars and professional interpreters both at home andabroad, great achievements have been made in the study of note-taking inChinese-English (CE) consecutive interpretation (CI).However, due to the limitationsof size of examinees and unpredictable variables, the empirical study of note-taking ininterpretation lags behind other theoretical studies of interpretation. This thesisfocuses on the empirical study of the relevance between the features of note-taking inCI and the quality of interpreting performance.The features and principles of note-taking in CI are first reviewed, followed bythe elaboration of the purposes, hypotheses and the experiment design of the study.An analysis is made not only of the features, namely word count, form and languagechoice, of the notes taken in two tasks by24MTI students, but also of the relationbetween such features and the quality of interpreting performance. The result showsthat:(1) Word count of the notes bears no remarkable relevance with the interpretingperformance.(2) As for the form of notes, the students use more SCC and symbolsthan complete Chinese words, English words and abbreviations; the number ofsymbols and abbreviations has no notable relevance with the interpreting performance,either.(3) As for language choice, in both tasks the source language is the dominantlanguage used in taking notes; the choice of the source or target language used in thenotes bears no significant relevance with the interpreting performance.On the basis of the above results of the experiment, the author tentativelyproposes some suggestions for teaching plans and methods in note-taking teaching inCI. It should also be pointed out that this study is only a preliminary empirical studyof note-taking in interpretation, and the validity of the study awaits further explorationin real interpreting practice.