(Non-)Sense in note-taking for consecutive interpreting

Abstract

The paper applies cognitive theories of text and language processing, and in particular relevance theory, to the analysis of notes in consecutive interpreting. In contrast to the pre-cognitive view, in which note-taking is seen mainly as a memory-supporting technique, the process of note-taking is described as the reception and production of a notation text. Adding the relevance-theoretical constructs of explicature and implicature to the general account of cognitive text processing as coherence building and the construction of a mental representation at local and global levels, this approach allows for the comparison of source, notation and target texts with respect to the underlying propositional representation, and shows how the sense of highly fragmentary notation texts is recovered in consecutive interpreting. The paper is based on an empirical study involving consecutive interpretations (English–German) by five trainee interpreters. The analysis shows that the interpreters operate relatively closely along micropropositional lines when processing the source, notation and target texts, with the explicature regularly having the same propositional form as the corresponding proposition in the source text.