A Study On The Correlation Between Student Interpreters’ Note-Taking And Interpreting Quality Under High Speech Rate

Interpreting is a challenging and intricate task in language processing.The emergence of interpreting as an autonomous field of research in the mid-70s has sparked interest in investigating the cognitive activities underlying interpreters’ performance.Note-taking,a salient feature of consecutive interpreting(CI),can assist interpreters in memorizing key information with higher efficiency and better quality of information extraction.It as well reveals crucial cognitive information and offers a critical perspective for observing the interpreting process.To fully delve into the research,two hypotheses were raised.The first is "at a high speech rate,the higher the percentage of TL notes,the better the interpreting quality;the lower the percentage of SL notes,the better the interpreting quality." The second is "at a high speech rate,the more notes interpreters take down,the better the interpreting quality."To verify the hypotheses,ten participants were invited to take a mock English-Chinese consecutive interpreting with the speed set at 185WPS.The empirical data was collected from the participants’ video and audio recordings and note-taking samples as well as retrospective interviews.After the collection of data,the research presented a theoretical and methodological discussion of note-taking samples from a cognitive load standpoint with the aim to reveal and recapitulate the note-taking features of student interpreters,elucidate the underlying rationale,and unveil the influence of note-taking on the quality of interpretation.After the empirical study,four findings were concluded.First,the percentage of TL notes in the total amount had a positive relationship with interpreting quality.Second,there was no clear link between the amount of notes and interpreting quality.Third,there appeared to be a possible negative correlation between the percentage of SL notes and interpreters’ delivery.Fourth,the increase in the share of symbols facilitated the interpreting process.