Liu (2008) contends that CI beginners should learn to acquire a note-taking system because CI note-taking is very different from note-taking for other purposes such as lectures notes taken down by students in class, notes made by reporters at a press conference, or shorthand notes taken by a secretary (Liu, 2008). She illustrates the relationship between the Notes, the Speech (the source text), and the Interpretation (the target text), with a simple graph (Figure 1). The size of the squares demonstrates that the word content of the Notes is significantly less than that in the Speech and in the Interpretation. However, in terms of message, the three squares could be of equal size because the Notes contain the same amount of messages as in the Speech and the Interpretation. To put it another way, the Notes are not a summary but a
“condensed” version of the Speech, and it can be “decondensed” to generate the Interpretation. According to Liu, CI notes could be written down in any language, are arranged on paper in a way that the space is effectively used, and serve as visual cues which carry sufficient meanings for immediate memory retrieval.
Indeed, notes are often considered a supplement, visual cues, or an aid, critical to a successful consecutive interpreting performance. The goal of note-taking is to enable subsequent retrieval, from notes and long-term memory, of the linguistic and informative elements of the original speech in order to ensure correct reproduction of the message in the TL (Abuín González, 2012). Gile (2009) also claims that in the Reformulation Phase in which Remembering Effort and Note-reading Effort intertwine, if notes are good, they help perform Remembering operations and may actually reduce Remembering capacity requirements rather than increase them.
Thus, note-taking should be based on commonsense rules of efficiency and economy (Ilg & Lambert, 1996) and requires selective and strategic processing of the original speech (Kohn & Kalina, 1996). The latter can be understood as an ability to decide, at all times throughout the process, which elements should be noted down and how
Speech Notes Interpretation
Figure 1. The relationship between the Notes, the Speech, and the Interpretation (Liu, 2008, p. 47)
12
they should be noted (using words, abbreviations, symbols, etc.), the amount of notes needed and also which languages should be used. Therefore, notes contain valuable information about the target text and may reveal a great deal about both the interpreter’s training and the techniques and strategies he employed while performing CI (Szabó, 2006).
Lee (2000) examined twelve student interpreters’ notes and delivery in CI from English to Chinese and had three major findings. First, regardless of years of training, students rely heavily on their notes in speech production. Second, training has more effect on students’ notes than on speech production, that is, training has resulted in similar styles of notes, but not balanced performances by students. Third, senior students demonstrate better capability in coordinating their notes and working memory in that they tend to deliver fuller of their incomplete or missing notes while junior students tend to translate their incomplete notes incompletely or even incorrectly, showing that their information processing before the act of note-taking is not deep enough. Tsui (2005) conducted an English-to-Chinese CI experiment on three groups of subjects who had received one, two, and three years (Y1, Y2, Y3) of CI training respectively. He found that Y2 subjects, compared with Y1 subjects, are superior in the level of comprehension, indicating that note-taking of Y2 subjects requires less effort than that of Y1 subjects, which relieves more effort to comprehension. Y2 and Y3 are similar in terms of comprehension, but Y3 subjects are better at re-expressing the messages understood, suggesting that Y3 subjects excel in retrieving messages from notes.
The two studies above found that note-taking and note-reading skills can be developed through training, and the mastery of such skills is associated with the interpreter’s comprehension and delivery. In fact, the topic of interpreters’ notes has generated a large volume of literature, most of them have focused on giving recommendations about what interpreters’ notes should look like or how notes should be taken. However, most of these recommendations are offered on the basis of personal experience and opinions without sufficient empirical support.
In interpreting schools, note taking is always taught early during the training.
Instructors tend to inform students some note-taking principles but eventually leave them to the students’ discretion on whether or not they want to follow. While it is generally believed among interpreters that note-taking systems are highly individualized, depending on personal preference, methods individually developed, familiarity with given subject, and memory capacity, there are two most commonly mentioned note-taking principles concerning the layout and language of notes:
“verticalization” and “target language”.
13 structure underlying a speech and the general semantic orientation of paragraphs and sentences, a telling, two-dimensional presentation helps the interpreter pick up the threads of message to be reformulated in the TL.
Liu (2008) also embraces Rozan’s suggestion of writing notes in a linear up-down, left-right pattern. What differs is she sees indentation as a different note-taking approach from verticalization. She claims that if notes are written horizontally from left to right, when an interpreter starts interpreting, his eyes have to move from the very left of a line to the very right, and then move downward to the left of the next line, which is time and energy consuming and could impede fluent interpreting rendition. On the contrary, a vertical layout falls easily in the interpreter’s visual area, allowing the interpreter to view as many words and symbols as possible in one glimpse, hence, facilitating rapid and fluent production of the target speech.
Therefore, vertical notes outweigh horizontal notes. Indentation, on the other hand, is a specific way to vertically arrange notes on paper which clearly indicate the relationship between different segments of the original speech. For instance, if a note element in the second line is indented compared to the element in the first line, it hints that the former information is subordinate to the latter; if they are arranged in parallel, then the two pieces of information are equally important.
The “verticalization” principle is followed by many experienced interpreters and is taught by interpreting instructors to students. Surprisingly so far there has been only one study (Ma, 2013) providing empirical evidence supporting the advantage of this principle. surface form of the incoming speech and facilitates better production of the target speech. Some others argue that the SL may be a better choice (Alexieva, 1994; Ilg, 1988, cited in Dam, 2004; Kirchhoff, 1979, cited in Dam, 2004) because it does not add the language conversion effort in the first phase of the consecutive interpreting
14
process, with its concurrent operations of listening, analysis, memory and attention.
In addition to the two main opposing positions, Matyssek (1989), cited in Dam (2004), advocates a largely language-independent system for note-taking, and adds that when this ideal cannot be achieved, the interpreter’s mother tongue should be preferred because of its status as the better mastered language.
So far, empirical studies of the language used in interpreters’ notes are still scant, especially quantitative ones. Dam is considered a pioneer in the research of interpreters’ choice of language and note-taking efficiency by introducing quantitative approaches, proposing additional categories for the analysis of the notes and creating methods and procedures for assessing efficiency. Her pilot study (Dam, 2004) consisted of five professional interpreters, with Danish as their native language (A language) and Spanish as their foreign language (B or C language), who interpreted from Spanish into Danish. All the interpreters showed a strong preference for taking notes in the TL, and tended to use the SL to a much lesser degree. This study also suggested a relationship between the degree of difficulty of the text and the use of the SL or TL, i.e. the more difficult the text, the more notes were taken in the SL, and the easier the text, the more notes were taken in the TL.
This phenomenon is understandable since the interpreter’s processing capacity is limited, as demonstrated by Gile’s Effort Model. Easy texts leave the interpreter with leeway to convert language in the listening phase. Difficult texts, by contrast, consume most of the interpreter’s energy in comprehending and analyzing, thus leaving him few cognitive resources in language conversion. As a result, he could only afford to write down what was heard, that is, the SL.
Her second experiment in the same study involved four student interpreters with three having Danish as their A language and Spanish as their B language, and the fourth having Spanish as A language and Danish as B language. They interpreted in both directions. The results showed that the subjects preferred to take notes in their A language, regardless of whether this language functioned as the TL or SL in the tasks. Dam concluded that the categories of A and B language are more relevant than the traditional ones of source and target language for describing language choice.
Dam later examined the function of notes, that is, efficiency and non-efficiency, by adopting a different approach (Dam et al., 2005). Notes that were used for analysis were taken by Spanish-Danish interpreters during a simulated conference. She compared the notes that generated clearly accurate rendition of the source text and those that produced clearly inaccurate rendition in order to find out how the former set of notes were different from the latter set of notes. The findings showed that accurate target text used more notes, more abbreviations, and more SL notes than
15
inaccurate target text. They therefore hypothesized that many notes better ensure target text accuracy than few notes. Abbreviations, rather than full words, and SL, rather than TL, require relatively less time and effort to jot, and hence enable interpreters to produce as many notes as possible.
Following Dam’s work, Szabó (2006) explored the language used by eight students at different stages of a two-year master’s program in conference interpreting. The subjects were practicing interpreters, with an average of three and a half years of professional experience before enrolling in the program. Their A language was Hungarian and B language was English. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicated that most subjects had a clear preference for taking notes in the B language, which was considered more concise than their A language, although they also tended to base their note-taking language choice on the status of the respective languages (SL or TL) in the task. Szabó raised the issue of note-taking economy and concluded that the nature (compactness and simplicity) of particular language pair is a relevant factor in the interpreters’ choice of note-taking language.
Similar research on language choice in note-taking has also been done in the language combination of English and Chinese. Li (2012) recruited nine interpreting majors at post-graduate level, who had a language combination of Chinese A and English B, to consecutively interpret two speeches, one from Chinese into English and the other from English into Chinese. Her findings suggested that the subjects showed a general preference of English over Chinese in both tasks. Li reckoned that when Chinese was the SL, the interpreters afforded a greater luxury converting it into the TL, English, during the note-taking phase since comprehending their mother tongue required little effort. However, when English, their B language, was the SL, the interpreters had to spend more effort in comprehension and thus had less leeway to convert the languages during the note-taking phase. As a result, they jotted down notes mainly in English. Moreover, English was viewed as a more efficient noting code than Chinese because it required fewer strokes and was easier to write or abbreviate with.
In addition to the above mentioned parameters that may affect the interpreters’
choice of language, such as task-related status of the language (SL vs. TL), the interpreter’s linguistic combination (A vs. B) and the nature of the interpreter’s language pair (i.e. morphologically long vs. non-morphologically long languages), another parameter—relative expertise of the interpreter has just begun to draw researchers’ attention, which will be discussed in detail in the last section of this chapter.
16
2.1.4 Summary
Unquestionably, notes play a pivotal role in CI as they aid an interpreter’s memory when the operations of message-receiving at the listening phase and message-producing at the interpreting phase are just minutes apart. While it is true that literature on notes is numerous, empirical studies are surprisingly scarce, especially regarding to the layout of notes. As for the language used in notes, all research has focused on the note-taking phase by discussing how the notes should be taken in order to alleviate an interpreter’s cognitive burden while he struggles with multiple tasks. For example, SL trumps TL because writing notes as how they are heard does not require the language-converting effort. A language outweighs B language because the former is the more mastered language. Also it is easier to jot the language that is less morphologically complex. Most of the existing studies drew conclusions by inferring from the research participants’ experiences and their interpreting performances without providing sufficient scientific data to prove that taking notes in a certain way does lighten an interpreter’s cognitive loads. Moreover, what kind of notes can facilitate efficient deciphering and thus can best reduce cognitive loads and quickly trigger memory during the interpreting phase is a perspective that has never been adopted. To fill this gap in the existing knowledge, Ma’s study (2013) employed the eye-tracking method to look into the cognitive loading that trainee interpreters experience in the note-reading and rendition phase.