Lecture 4 口译笔记案例详解在线视频

Hello everyone

Nice to see you again

Here is the online course

Interpreting: Theory and Practice

I’m your lecturer Catherine

I believe you still remember

all the instructions about note-taking

including its layout

necessary tools

widely-accepted symbols and abbreviations

Yet

a common phenomenon is that learners

often find themselves unconsciously adopting their usual way

way of taking notes

For instance

most learners are used to write notes

from the left to the right horizontally

Besides

they tend to write everything down

in case they may forget some points

This is particularly true for beginners

They are often unaware of their problems

So they may continue their ways

and never seem to be on the right track

Today

I bring forward some poor examples of note-taking

and explain them in detail

If you’re still confused about note-taking

please make sure to study the examples carefully

Trust me

you’ll benefit from them

The first example is about business negotiation

Unfortunately

the two parties failed to reach a business deal

because of the poor performance of the interpreter

Watch this video clip and try to figure out

how the interpreter’s performance

affected the negotiation result

This is quite a typical example

Let’s summarize the interpreter’s shortcomings

The most apparent is the poor preparation

We can see that he was in all thumbs

Instead of using top-opening notebooks

he merely used several scraps of paper

Second too many notes

He seemed to be trying to write everything down

so he’s busy looking for space to write

The result

of course

was that his notes were in disorder

We mentioned in earlier lectures

that one typical feature of interpreting is immediacy

To transfer source information to audiences timely

the interpreter must make his/her notes

readable and meaningful

In opposite

the interpreter in this video

spent nearly 7 seconds organizing his notes

before he started to interpret

A common practice in interpreting

is that an interpreter

should wait no more than 3 seconds

before he/she starts to speak

otherwise

it may cause misunderstanding

The third and perhaps the most terrible

is that he took the wrong number

The number was misinterpreted to 500,000

instead of the correct one million

In business negotiations

numbers may appear many times to refer to a date

quantities of order

prices

commission

discount and so on

Once misinterpreted

it’s hardly possible to strike a deal

which of course

may lead to loss of benefit to both parties

Some interpreters have too much confidence

in themselves

believing they’ll handle the job A-ok

while others lack professional ethics

As a consequence

they cannot take on the task in a professional way

which results in adverse outcomes

as the video example shows

Beginners who lack practice

often have something in common in taking notes

The following are two examples of poor notes

from students

Let’s study them and find out

how they can be improved

我们在诸如反恐怖主义

经济

贸易和国际及区域性问题等广泛的领域

进行合作

已有效地保障了我们的共同利益

促进了亚太地区和全世界的和平

稳定与繁荣

Here are the student’s notes

How do you think of it?

I believe you had the same first impression as I did

so many words

Beginners often hold a misunderstanding

that they’ll definitely forget some information

if they don’t write all of them down

So they try to take as many notes as possible

consciously avoiding abbreviations and symbols

for fear that they can’t read them

as shown in the student’s example

Example one is in Chinese

If all of the notes are written in Chinese

it takes a longer time than in letters

symbols and abbreviations

Let’s try to improve the notes

There are five characters in the first phrase

and it’s barely impossible to write

all of them down within a short time

We can shorten it like this

It’s much simpler and quicker to write

We can deal with the second in the same way

by using the three initial letters

of the English word “regional”

For the third one

we can use a checkmark

to represent something successful or effective

A parallel structure is used in the fourth

including three words“peace, stability and prosperity”

We can use brackets to signify their logical relation

The fifth contains two characters and the student used

the corresponding English word

that contains ten letters which is really redundant

In English

the word “prosperity” means economically developed

which implies financial status

So we can use the abbreviation

“pros”or even the symbol for money

These are my notes for your reference

You can see my notes are more concise

compared with the students’

It saves me much time

use of symbols and abbreviations

Let’s look at another example

At the close of the 20th century

mankind has witnessed the unprecedented progress

in information and communication technology

which has brought about

profound changes in almost every aspect of our life

Education is no exception

It looks better this time

More symbols and not many words

But there’s still some room for improvement

For instance

the word “century”has seven letters

and the usual way of writing it

it is to use the capital letter “C” to represent it

In taking notes of “unprecedented progress”

the student used both characters and an English word

An easier way is to use this symbol

to indicate “something that happened in the past”

with an arrow inside implying progress

Relative pronouns are usually omitted in notes

More often

we use an arrow pointing to the results they bring forward

Here are my notes for your reference

Your notes might be similar to the student’s

To better improve your notes and save time

you can make some adjustments

according to my suggestions

In next lecture

I’ll give you demos

on how to take notes while listening

It’s more challenging

Please get prepared in advance and follow my step

to start taking notes as an interpreter does

I’m looking forward to seeing you again