The Impact Of Systematical Learning Of Note-taking Methods In Consecutive Interpreting For Note-taking Beginners

Consecutive interpreting,according to Daniel Gile’s Effort Model,can be divided into two phases: the first is comprehension phase,or listening and note-taking phase,and the second is speech production or reformulation phase(Gile,2009).No matter for helping interpreters to save capacity or to better memorize the contents,note-taking is absolutely of great significance in these two phases,either for professional interpreters or new interpreting learners.This thesis,based on an empirical study on the notes of note-taking beginners,aims find out whether note-taking system is valid in improving the quality of interpretation for them.The experiment 1)takes a group of note-taking beginners as the experiment subjects,which group has rarely been covered in previous studies;2)invites them to do the two-way consecutive interpreting tasks,both from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English,with most of the previous studies focused on one single way.This empirical study is intended to find out the relation between the performance of notes and the quality of interpretation,thus drawing a conclusion on the impact of systematical learning of taking notes in consecutive interpreting,especially for notetaking beginners and giving some suggestions for both teachers and CI learners to enhance their work related to consecutive interpreting note-taking.Starting from these aims,the author raises three questions as follows:a.What difficulties would note-taking beginners encounter in taking notes?b.What are the general characteristics of notes in note-taking beginners’ C-E and E-C consecutive interpreting?c.What is the impact of systematical learning of note-taking methods for note-taking beginners in English to Chinese and Chinese to English consecutive interpreting?Through the notes analyzed and data collected,the answers of research questions are as below:First,note-taking beginners might face the problem of lacking in deverbalization;overreliance on notes;unsystematic note-taking format;and failure in information recalling.Second,in taking notes in both C-E and E-C consecutive interpreting,the following characteristics are found: 1)the number of notes differs among the participants,but the proportion of the number of notes is generally in a certain range;2)no matter for E-C or C-E consecutive interpreting,participants tend to use more source language and L1 in taking notes;3)participants tend to use more abbreviations in E-C consecutive interpreting,while using more complete words in C-E consecutive interpreting;4)the use of symbols and links are less frequently compared to other types of notes.Third,the systematical learning of note-taking methods is beneficial in improving the quality of interpretation.In this empirical study,there are both participants taking notes in systematical formats,and also participants taking notes without a rule.The result is the former group gets a higher score than the latter one.Those who perform well in the use of target language,abbreviations and symbols get a higher score than who don’t.