earticle

영어

This paper deals with notetaking skills which are key elements of consecutive interpreting performance and reports findings from a pilot study on interpreters’ consecutive interpreting with notes. With a view to contributing to consecutive interpreting training, this paper discusses basic principles in notetaking and some effective notetaking skills that may contribute to the enhancement ofinterpreting performance. The pilot study examines five interpreters’ consecutive interpreting performances and their notes taken with a Smartpen. The findings suggest three types of efficient notetaking skills. First, interpreters need to adopt dynamic notetaking. Dynamic notetaking refers to taking additional notes swiftly not necessarily following the left-to-right and top-down movement, storing temporarily key information in their working memory while catching up with the source text. Second, interpreters need to take a note of the syntactic structure of the source text in order to effectively reproduce a complicated or convoluted sentence. Third, interpreters need to use symbols in a consistent manner in order to avoid confusion and misinterpretation. Just as the use of a Smartpen enabled the researchers to analyse the subjects’ notetaking in real time, the Smartpen is expected to be a useful tool for teaching and training notetaking skills. Given the limitations of research methodology, it would be worthwhile to examine if training these skills leads to the enhancement of consecutive interpreting performance through a large scale experimental study.