A Study On The Logical Relation Marks In Interpreting Note-taking

When interpreters take notes in consecutive interpreting, they mainly use some symbols to indicate the close semantic and logical relations between information units Logical connectives are important signs reflecting the logical relations in the general structure as well as the overall structure of the source information. Logical analysis of the input information is one of the most important features of comprehension in interpreting process. Three hypotheses are proposed in this thesis: interpreters who have better interpreting performance use fewer words in their notes than those who show relatively poorer performance; interpreters who have better interpreting performance usually take notes in more multiple forms or layouts than those who show relatively poorer performance; and interpreters who have better interpreting performance took down more logical relation marks in their notes than those who show relatively poorer performance, which aim to explore the impact of interpreting notes exerted on the interpreting quality, especially the impact of the logical relation marks in notes on the quality of interpreting.This thesis gives a review of the relevant studies on note-taking in interpreting, and relevant concepts and researches of the Schema Theory. Then it elaborates the whole process of the note-taking experiment including the preparatory work of the experiment, the collection of experiment data, data analysis and a further discussion. This study gives a detailed analysis of the experiment results based o n the interpreting notes data and the oral-recall recordings of 18 MTI students and the interviews with some of these subjects. The experiment results show that the notes of the experimental subjects who got higher scores are concise, legible and clear in layout; these experimental subjects paid more attention to the logical relations in source information and they noted down more logical connectives. On the contrary, the experimental subjects who got relatively lower scores usually failed to grasp the logical relations in the source information, which directly affected the quality of their interpretation. Based on the analysis of the experiment results, this study concludes that the logical relation marks are the product of the logical analysis of the source information, which can help the interpreters to accurately grasp the overall structure of the input information and the logical relations between information units, and thus can help with the interpreters’ recall of the details.