Economy and efficiency of note-taking in consecutive interpreting from English to Chinese: A study on Ear-Pen Span, Note-Taking Duration, Units, and Quality

Note-taking serves an important memory-supporting role in consecutive interpreting. It greatly facilitates the reproduction of the same message in another language. Previous research mainly focused on note-taking and interpreting performance but studies failed to reach consensus on whether and how choice of form and language in note-taking influences interpreting performance. This was possibly due to lack of consistency in annotation of the notes and the fact that note-taking itself diverts interpreters’ attention from listening to the source language and analyzing the message. We take a different perspective on note-taking, exploring economy and efficiency and using empirical data to examine their interrelationship. We also propose a novel classification and annotation schema, which can be used in future large-scale investigations.