The Relation Between Source Text Difficulty And Language Choice For Note-taking In Consecutive Interpreting

Note-taking is an irreplaceable part in the Effort Model applied in consecutive interpreting.Its contribution lies in helping to relieve interpreters’ cognitive loads,activating their memory and facilitating smooth interpreting output.Existing studies have mainly focused on investigating the features of languages for note-taking in CI between novice and professional interpreters based on the source material at the same level,or on which language they should choose to jot down notes for CI,taking from the perspective of the status in interpreters’ language combination.Few have studied language choice for note-taking from the perspective of the difficulty of source materials.From this perspective,student interpreters can have a better understanding of what causes their choice of language of CI note-taking according to their own notes’ forms under the influence of source text difficulty,a feedback that guides them in CI task.For instance,in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting,more proportion of complete Chinese characters may indicate that the interpreter has difficulty in source text comprehension and should do more interpreting exercises without taking notes to improve the skill of listening and analysis.It is on this basis that this study tries to answer its core question through seeking the relations between source text(Chinese or English)difficulty and student interpreters’ language choice for note taking in consecutive interpreting: as difficulty increases,is there a certain tendency in language choice for note-taking in Chinese-English and English-Chinese CI accordingly? First-year graduate students of the English MTI program of a Chinese university were chosen as subjects in this study,and the investigation methods of audio and video recording,interviewing,and observing students’ notes manuscripts were applied to collect data and conduct quantitative analysis.The results of the study indicate that for Chinese-English tasks,the proportion of Chinese notes increases with the difficulty of the source text,while for English-Chinese tasks,there is no significant difference in the percentage of notes either language takes as text difficulty increases.With this in mind,this study discusses the findings from two perspectives of language categorization: the dichotomy of source language(SL)and target language(TL)with regard to the role in interpreting,and the division of the first language(L1)and the second language(L2)with regard to the status in the interpreter’s language combination.It is on this basis that the following suggestions are put forward for novice interpreters in CI: the interpreting text should be appropriately selected to be within the range of one’s ability;the training should start from interpreting without taking notes to interpreting with notes so as to constantly improve one’s abilities of information processing,cognitive coordination and shorthand skills;the interpreter should apply macro-thinking to in note-taking task;the interpreter should build his/her own CI note system by summarizing their patterns and features from numerous interpreting exercises for the purpose of achieving automatic output in note-taking.