How can note-taking improve your
interpreting skills?
April 5, 2017 11:52 am
Just imagine you are a consecutive interpreter, which
means you possess an appropriate level of
the target and source language, knowledge of the
surrounding world and the subjects of speech, good
memory and other vitallanguage skills like listening,
understanding, speaking and grammar. During your
interpreting career you are obliged to follow long
speeches and interpret them in detail as quickly as
possible. Interpretation envisages making a rendition of
speech rather than a summary, which involves a lot
of stress – especially when you are a beginner interpreter
and you are not aware about some useful principles of
notation that help you memorise. In this post you will read
about some interpretation strategies that may help reduce
the time of the speech memorisation.
Abbreviations and symbols system
One of the best practices is using the symbol that
represents an idea instead of a word. Thanks to jotting
down symbols and abbreviations, interpreters can make a
perfect draft for later rendition from the source language
into the target one, as well as for transferring the meaning
of the speech. One of the techniques is to avoid using
double consonants, even though some or all vowels are
missing. While using the method presented beneath,
interpreters should not omit the key information from the
speech. For example, write “cmte” instead of “committee”,
“hstry” instead of “history”. Another very useful method is
taking benefit from abbreviations, which means omitting
endings, using only the first vowels and double letters, or
first two or three letters of certain words to note
down information. The best advice is not to
overuse abbreviations and symbols at the beginning of
the interpreter’s career – especially when you are not so
familiar with them and you can forget what they stand for.
So, you can try to add a new abbreviation only when you
know the former ones.
Abbreviation Original word
w/ with
w/o without
app. approximately
stat. statistics
gvt. government
(Source: “Interpretation Techniques and Exercises”, James
Nolan)
You can take advantage of using symbol “x” for the word
”time” and link it with other symbols to make noting down
time expressions quicker and easier to be remembered.
Abbreviation Original word
xx many times, often
xx+ many times more
xx- many times less
xtx from time to time, occasionally
2x twice
3x-/ three times less than
(Source: “Interpretation Techniques and Exercises”, James
Nolan)
If you would like to negate something, just put “no OK”
instead of “OK” which stands for “approved”.
Let’s have a look at the most useful abbreviations and
symbols
Create an own notation system
The main goal during notation is to establish your own
best practice, as everyone has completely different
personalities and ways of acquiring and retrieving
something from memory, so it is better to adjust
the aforementioned basic principles and develop
an own notation system. The common practice is to keep
your notes brief, clear and accurate, and just follow the
rule of “economy of words”. There are some types of
informationfrom the speech that have to be jotted down,
like proper names, numbers, dates, links and separations
between ideas, tenses of verbs, modal verbs, figures,
points of view, and complete lists. You should
also remember that there is not enough time to jot down
every sentence, so concentrate on putting down the most
vital ideas rather than taking down whole sentences. While
taking notes, in general you can omit articles,
exclamations, unimportant prepositions, adjectives and
adverbs. It is important to focus on the overall
comprehension of the speech and grasp the most
important things to transfer to the participants. So, it is
highly recommended to take notes only in the target
language to reduce the time-consuming process of
translation to a minimum. Thanks to this practice,
interpreters can avoid making mistakes in the grammar
structures, vocabulary or make some funny calques or
misinterpretations.
Watch a video about consecutive note-taking:
Consecutive note-taking part I
Consecutive note taking part II
Written by Aleksandra Święcicka. Journalist, web editor and
social media expert. Communication Trainee at TermCoord.
Edited by Doris Fernandes del Pozo –
Journalist, Translator-Interpreter and Communication
Trainee at the Terminology Coordination Unit of the
European Parliament. She is pursuing a PhD as part of the
Communication and Contemporary Information
Programme of the University of Santiago de Compostela
(Spain).
Sources:
Nolan, James (2005) Interpretation Techniques and
Exercises, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Available at: http://bit.ly/2nWReVj (Accessed 05 April,
2017)
