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Note-Taking Strategies and Techniques. Teaching and practicing of note-taking

3.1. What to Note

As to what the interpreter should note, W. Keiser suggests the following:

1. Always ideas, arguments, never just words. But write down all proper names, figures, titles, quotes.

2. Who speaks and about whom or what.

3. Tense of the action, i.e. present, past or future.

4. Whether the statement is negative, positive, interrogative or exclamatory.

5. Connections between ideas and arguments.

6. Emphasis and stress. [cited in: 66]

The ideas below are compiled from pages 50-51, 55 and 68 of Pedagogie Raisonnee de l'Interpretation (Reasoned Didactics of Interpreting), written by two of the biggest names in the history of interpreting and interpreter training, D.Seleskovitch and M.Lederer. Originally written in 1989, the 2002 edition is also sponsored by the European Commission. It is also now available in translation as "A systematic approach to interpreter training" by J. Harmer.

So, D.Seleskovitch and M.Lederer suggest that the interpreter should note the following:

1. The ideas. The essence. A single symbol or word can represent an entire idea.

2. Causality, consequence, links etc. and the relation of the ideas to one another in time.

3. Transcodable terms. Words than must be repeated rather than deverbalised and interpreted.

4. Numbers. Note the numbers immediately, interrupting whatever you are noting to note the number as they cannot be remembered from context and noted later as ideas can.

5. Proper names. If you don't know a name, note it phonetically and see if you can work out how to say it properly in your target language later. If you can't then substitute a generic like "the UK delegate" rather than mangling the name.

6. Technical terms. Specific to the context of the speech.

7. Lists. Lists of words which are not integral parts of the sentences in which they are held overload the memory. So note them.

8. The first sentence of each new idea should be noted with particular care. This does not mean verbatim but with care.

9. Last sentence of the speech should be noted with particular care.

10. Striking usage. If the speaker uses a word or expression that stands out he has probably used it deliberately and will want it to appear in the interpretation. [65]

Notes taken by students have shown that they tend to stick to words. They hesitate to free themselves to concentrate on meaning by throwing away the lexical form like words and structures etc. They try to retain each word of the source utterance. Consequently, their short-term memory will be quickly overloaded with individual lexical items, which may not even form a meaningful sentence. Moreover, their attention will be wasted on finding equivalent lexical items in the target language rather than the meaning of incoming message. Clearly, these students may not have recognized that things to be noted are logically related to “the mental analysis of the speech” (or “sense analysis”, that will be considered further). Notes are not expected to be complete or organized exactly the same way as in the original speech. Instead they are expected to provide the cues necessary to remember the information in the speech. Notes can be compared to the skeleton outline of the speech shaped with main ideas and the links between them.