Exploring Note-taking Fluency In Consecutive Interpreting

A literature review of previous studies on interpreting notes and perceived difficulties in note-taking in consecutive interpreting reveals that note-taking skill in CI is an important component of interpreting skills.It entails a large amount of practice before note-taking skill proceeds from declarative knowledge to procedural knowledge.Notetaking fluency is regarded as a measurement to measure note-taking skill in a quantitative way,yet scarce research has been devoted to further exploring its role in practice.Employing an interpreting note-taking fluency scale,this empirical study sets out to examine the differences in note-taking fluency between high-level and low-level interpreting learners.The former consists of 32 postgraduate students while the latter is made up of 66 undergraduate students.Data analysis showed that interpreting learners from the high-level group exhibited significantly higher fluency in note-taking than those from the low-level group.Such a difference can be attributed to different amounts of practice in note-taking.In particular,it was found that note reading skill stood out as a critical criterion to distinguish between different interpreting levels.As for the correlations between four constructs of note-taking fluency(coordination between listening comprehension and note-taking,timeliness of note-taking,systematicity in note-taking,and note reading),the data showed that timeliness and systematicity were positively correlated at the early stage of interpreting learning,and enhancement in these two skills contributed to improving the skill of coordinating.However,it seemed that interpreters who were better at coordination were likely to display worse performance at note reading,especially among interpreting learners in the high-level group.