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Coherence building in note-taking for consecutive interpreting: an investigation of professional and trainee interpreters’ layout of notes
Comprehending the source speech, which can be understood as a coherence-building process, lies at the core of the success of any interpreting task. In long Consecutive Interpreting (CI), interpreters take notes during the comprehension phase to optimize subsequent retrieval of the information stored in memory during the reformulation phase. This study sets out to gain insight into the coherence-building process in CI by investigating the relationship between the source text structure and interpreters’ notes, with a particular focus on the layout features. The research objectives are to investigate coherence-building strategies in CI note-taking, and the development of expertise in comprehension skills.
The thesis is presented in the Thesis by Publication format, which consists of four standalone publishable articles. The first article presents a preliminary investigation of the layout features of professional interpreters’ notes, using Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson, 1988) as a descriptive framework. It is found that the notes are aggregated into visually identifiable groups, which correspond to text spans in the source speech to a great extent. The findings lay the foundation for the subsequent investigations.
The following two chapters proceed to compare professional and trainee interpreters, looking at how they process text segments and establish coherence relations between them in note-taking. The major findings can be summarized as follows: First, despite the prevailing notion that note-taking is a highly individualised skill, it is found that both professionals and trainees are fairly consistent in how they structure their notes to reflect the organization of the source text. Drawing on the RST signaling corpus (Das & Taboada, 2018), it is also found that the interpreters take note of both explicit and implicit signals of coherence relations. Secondly, in view of the development of expertise, the professionals in general perform better at processing the macrostructure of the source text, and seem to direct more attention to coherence relations by writing more implicit signal words and drawing more symbols to visualise connection between groups of notes. Such differences could arguably contribute to the varied levels of self-perceived difficulty in retrieving information from memory in the note-reading phase.
Finally, a pilot study using eye-tracking technology explores the potential relationship between structural features of notes and the coherence-building effort in the note-reading process. The preliminary results show that, in addition to the total number of notes and the choice of language, the layout features seem to be an important factor as far as cognitive load in note-reading is concerned.
Taken together, this thesis makes methodological and empirical contributions to understanding the coherence-building process in CI note-taking. The layout of notes is found to be reflective of the interpreter’s comprehension and note-taking strategies. Expertise appears to play an important role when allocating attentional resources to source text analysis in the note-taking effort, which could result in reduced coherence-building effort in the note-reading phase. The results have pedagogical implications for teaching note-taking, and the methods and findings from this exploratory study could open avenues for future research.
