Should interpreters learn short-hand?

By Daniel Cheng

If you are not entirely sure, your answer would probably be yes. After all, what is the harm of knowing one more thing, learning one more skill? Short-hand may or may not be helpful to the interpreter. But that is not the issue. A more pertinent and meaningful question is Can short-hand be a hindrance? To form an opinion on this, we will have to have some idea about how it works and what it does for the user. Short-hand is any system of rapid handwriting which can be used to transcribe the spoken word. (from the Omniglot web-page). So bits of the interpreters notes can be seen as some kind of short-hand as, for instance, I would use M for methamphetamine in a drug trial and P for photosynthesis in a botany conference. In both cases, I have taken down, or transcribed, a key word in an abbreviated form. In fact there are special symbols in Pitmans short-hand to represent high frequency words like and, if, or etc. But .. how about the rest of my notes?

My garden soil has a lot of clay, making it very dry and hard most of the year. After many years, I have found that the best way to garden is to have permanent shrubs and perennials, and then have the flowers in pots around the back door. They can be moved at will and are all very near the outside water tap. It makes a big difference having coloured pots, providing extra interest. I am rather fond of the stripey pyjama one. In winter I empty the pots down by the compost bins and bury the tender plants such as fuchsias in the spent soil. I do not want to risk the pots getting damaged in a hard frost.

The two most popular systems of short-hand are Pitmans and Greggs. They work very much in the same way. They are both phonetic, i.e. they record the sound of the speech rather than the spelling, using strokes of varying shapes, positions and thickness. So male and mail would be recorded in the same way. The same applies to bear (a cuddly animal which you are well-advised not to cuddle), bear (to suffer) and bare (exposed). To tell what the speaker is referring to, we must first turn the sound into the range of possible words in our heads, and then deduce the intended word and meaning from the context. This means that the message is not in plain view. Some extra work has to be done to get it.

A sound record is of little use to the interpreter because interpreting is not transliteration. Even a record of actual words spoken is not much better because interpreting is not word-for-word translation. In fact, none of the original words survives in the rendition in the target language. Any persistent remnants of their shadows, instead of helping, would rather make the rendition less idiomatic and natural. It is crucial to understand that while words carry message, they are not message. The relationship is rather like that between body and soul. Interpreting is reincarnation, or the channelling of the soul into a new body. Stenographers can take down anything without knowing what it is all about. What use would such notes be for the interpreter, whose job is to transfer message? What the interpreter needs is a record of messages, or the essence of intended meaning. I would use the same symbol : to denote the soul of the family of words like say, announce, decree, utter, remark, assert, comment, voice etc as expressing ones opinion verbally. You might note that this soul-searching approach greatly improves understanding and simplifies the task of note-taking. Another important question is Does the interpreter need a complete and non-selective record? The interpreters notes are a jogger and complement of memory, not a replacement. They are also not meant for the archive. So why should we include things that can be safely consigned to memory? This leads us to consider a crucial practical factor: time. The more furiously you scribble, the less time you have in extracting and comprehending the message, the more distracted you are from active listening and the more difficult it is to retrieve the message from the growing haystack during delivery. When it comes to note-taking for interpreting, less is nearly always better. What should we find in the interpreters notes then? Following is my list.

The key messages (not so much the words that carry them --- remember my symbol :) and the links (also in the form of symbols e.g. ) to cover both the content and the structure of the utterance. Bits the interpreter has difficulty remembering e.g. numbers, names; any crucial key words. Nothing that s/he can remember should be there. Lots of symbols, abbreviations and signs. Complete words are rare exceptions. This greatly reduces writing time. The message should be noted in such a way as to jump out of the page at the interpreter. This is because the interpreter would not be reading from the notes. S/he will need to retrieve the message at a glance. Wise formatting e.g. large writing, one idea per line, double lines to separate main ideas.

In a nutshell, what the interpreter needs is a selective record of messages gleaned from the utterances in an easily retrievable form. What short-hand provides is an indiscriminate heap of raw audio signals. In doing short-hand, the interpreters attention is shifted from what s/he needs to focus on to something entirely useless and completely irrelevant. So, what is your verdict?