There has been
considerable debate over what language to use in taking notes for consecutive
interpreting, but no consensus has been reached among scholars. In particular,
little is known about the Chinese-English language pair with regard to language
preference and efficiency. This study examines novice/trainee interpreters’
language use in relation to quality of interpreting. The findings revealed the
interpreters generally used their L1 (A language) whether interpreting to or
from that language, but that sometimes translators consistently chose either
the source language (SL) or the target language (TL) relative to each
translation. Contrary to some past
findings that the use of source language facilitates interpretation, here we
see that it correlated negatively with the quality of the renditions in this
study. Students who used the target language obtained the highest scores of all
the categories. The findings described in this paper help to identify Chinese
trainee interpreters’ approach and, show that quantitative analysis of the
relationship between language use in notes and the quality of interpretation
adds to our understanding of the relationship between notes and awarded grades.
Questions are raised about didactic issues in training interpreters.
