Empirical Study On Difficulties And Causes Of Taking Notes By Interpreting Beginners

With the development of economic globalization and gradual expansion of demands, interpreters can be found in any occasions such as formal political talks and daily reception and accompany. Whenever they interpret for formal occasions such as political talks and press conferences or interpret stranger or more informative source texts, interpreters usually need taking notes to assist their interpreting in order to keep the information complete and exact.Extemporaneousness and instantaneity, interpretation’s unique features, are great challenges to interpreters’ memories. How to explore interpreters’ short-term memories to the maximum depends on taking notes. Therefore, skills of taking notes in interpretation are always regarded as basic and necessary skills for all interpreters. Taking notes in a correct and effective way may help interpreters in storing source text information and improving interpreters’ quality and efficiency of extracting information and expressing target languages.However, numerous empirical studies show that taking notes may not play the role of assisting memories but may become disturbing factors of influencing interpretation’s quality for interpreting beginners who have not grasp the principles and skills of taking notes expertly. Therefore, on this phenomenon, this paper makes a research on the difficulties in taking notes by interpreting beginners, analyzes the causes of these difficulties and puts forward some solutions in order to prompt interpreting beginners grasp skills of taking notes more quickly and better and then improve their interpretation abilities.Eight Japanese MTI interpreting beginners as objects of study, this paper collects numerous data and concludes difficulties of taking down by interpreting beginners in their practice by indicative recall, semi-structural interview and analyzing their notes. Difficulties of taking notes lie in the stages of taking down notes and outputting notes. In the stage of taking down notes, it is mainly difficult to choose key information, to choose signs for notes and to record information exactly. In the stage of outputting notes, it is difficult to decode notes and output notes. Through looked up relevant empirical studies in national and international references, this paper analyzes the causes in terms of objective and subjective causes. Objective causes include the features of texts and languages. While subjective cause include interpreters’ narrow range of knowledge, poor language ability, poor self-study ability and poor psychological quality and so on.On the difficulties and causes of taking down by interpreting beginners, this study gives solutions and suggestions accordingly, including reading encyclopedic knowledge, improving language ability, strengthening notes-taking training, and increasing the memory training. Meanwhile, this study may also offer some references for interpreting students’ study of taking notes and note-taking teaching in interpretation.