This paper tackles the issue of the lack of a substantially new approach to classifying the interpreters’ notes. In my paper, I highlight the fact that the researchers in the field are yet to agree on the contents of interpreters’ notes, and that is, in my opinion, the problem that is numerously stumbled upon in consecutive interpretation research in general and note-taking research in particular. Not only do researchers invent new classifications within an excising paradigm, sometimes they contradict each other presenting different definitions for the same concepts. This paper attempts to solve the issue by introducing a new perspective on the contents of interpreters’ notes by adapting the human-centered approach and turning to the “writers” of the notes, the interpreters. The interpreter trainees who participated in this research were interviewed to obtain an in-depth understanding of what is included in interpreters’ notes. Under the semiotic perspective, which assumes both linguistic and non-linguistic notes as a system of signs, I classified the interpreters’ notes based on the subject’s comments to the notes they had written. This retrospective approach unveiled how interpreter trainees perceive their notes which prompt meaning-making and facilitate the memory when delivering interpretation.
This article reports on a small-scale empirical study on note-taking in consecutive interpretation. Present-day interpretation labor market has faced a number of changes, as nowadays interpreters challenge themselves to work with different language combinations. A sufficient level of an in-demand language skill is now critical for employability of young trainees in the labor market. The present research illustrates the way interpreter trainees with different language skill sets carry out similar tasks in different interpretation settings.For primary research data, the study uses results of a background survey, complete with audio recordings of the performance and the notes produced by eight subjects while interpreting an English source text consecutively into Japanese. The aim of the study is to explore the differences in consecutive interpretation of interpreters in classical settings (L2 to L1) and in emerging new trends in the labor market (L2 to L3). The article argues that the language skill required for each trend in the interpretation labor market is defined by the specific interpretation settings.
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