[0:00]Note-taking for consecutive interpreting. David Violet here. We are going to take a look at some of the techniques, but also the bigger picture about note-taking for consecutive and just consecutive itself. Consecutive is something that's a little bit like playing a piano, I like to say in my in my courses. It's something where you of course in the piano, you get to sort of do it over and over again if you're playing from a score and uh when you do interpretation, of course you're always waiting for the next uh unexpected thing that comes up. The whole thing is a matter of uh following a a speaker who will go wherever she or he wants to go. But it is still very similar to uh a musical instrument where it just takes a lot of practice in order to get every number, every name, every nuance of style. Every logical link from one point to the next, uh to get the right tone. That it's it's a matter largely of practice, but it's also a matter of getting down your notes so that everything is there at least to the extent necessary to jog your memory so that you can produce your interpretation accurately, faithfully, completely, and confidently, pleasantly, and also quite quickly. It is something that takes time. You you need to make a commitment. Say, I am going to learn this and it's a lot like a musical instrument or it's a lot like learning the foreign languages you learned. You you decide to do it and you just commit, commit to the time, commit to the work because that's what it takes. But doing all that work the wrong way would be a terrible pity and what I would like to help you with is for you to be as efficient and effective as possible. So that every minute of practice is something that is working for you and uh no part of that minute is working against you because you're working on bad habits or bad technique. I know the feeling, you just are constantly having your attention divided between writing the notes and listening. And we find ourselves when we're first starting this process or maybe after many years if you haven't really stuck with it and figured it out and practiced it to the point of being proficient, the same problem keeps coming back. You realize that you've written something but it distracted your listening and you you did not hear something. Or you come across something on your page and you it's a mystery, what on earth that may mean? Or you are listening and as you write, you're constantly wondering, what what should I write? I don't have a symbol for that, I don't know what to write. I'm a little bit lost and then all of a sudden, the whole thing is starting to go off the tracks because we're not concentrating on the listening. It's a little bit like driving a a vehicle, you are constantly watching ahead attentive to anything because an accident is uh something that uh has to be avoided by all costs. And in interpreting, an accident is when you end up not hearing, not listening, not registering, and you will not know what to say in a case like that. All the techniques that I teach and that I will really would like to teach you in these videos, these uh free videos on YouTube, I'm covering uh pretty much all that I that I that I know, all that I teach. Um but I do have also a course, it's not ready yet, but I have a course online and I also uh do coaching and occasionally we have a free uh practice session, a guided practice session where I I teach uh I'm I'm one of the most important aspects of that practice session is that you learn how to practice. There is a way to practice that is most fruitful and mainly about how you critique someone, how you help someone else and how you get someone else to help you to uh nail down the techniques and really become proficient through practice. Today, we are going to look at several aspects of the note-taking method that I teach. The whole idea is there is a series of there's so many aspects actually, but there are a few core aspects that I'm going to go through a few of them today. When you listen to someone's speaking, it's a flow of speech just like I'm speaking now. My whatever I say will influence what I say next and it may change my plan, even though I may have something of a plan, and speakers have may have an outline but frequently they diverge, right? They go off and they they will not stick to uh even a prepared text that they may have provide provided you in the first place. So speech really is a flow of unpredictable and pretty messy um information. It's just coming at you and one of the first techniques that we teach is that you need to chunk it. You need to turn it into bite-size parts, parts that you can chew, parts that you can separate off and um make them manageable. That's true with almost any task. Break any task down, any long, involved, difficult process, try to break it down into many tasks, many parts and then digest and manage each part, uh which is manageable. So in speech, the we're going to call these uh the idea. The idea is something that means it's generally a sentence, when someone starts an idea. Generally there's something of a subject, a verb and an object. Of course there may be many add-ons, many qualifiers, uh many dependent clauses, etcetera. But generally speaking we can say that the idea is close to a sentence. So we're going to break this chaotic or at least unpredictable flow of speech into chunks and the chunks are roughly sentences. And these chunks are something we'll call ideas. And we put the idea in a box on the page. I say box because we've got the two sides of the column delineated and we are going to write our idea in there and then we are going to draw a line and say, okay, that's the end of that idea. I've seen so many of my students notes where they seem to be taking pretty good notes, but they don't draw this horizontal line under each idea. So what you have is uh again the problem of this continuous flow, whereas that's the problem you want to overcome uh during your note-taking. You want to delineate the end of an idea. It's part of making it manageable and then you may link it to the next idea, which will be below that line. And then another line to to de delineate the end of that idea. So the whole idea here is to break your message into parts, to draw a horizontal line under the notes for that idea and then just keep going like that down the page. And so we talk about the the idea, then the horizontal line going under each idea and then we may link these together again. So we may a person may uh refer to a logical link, maybe implicitly or explicitly, saying, and therefore this happened. So the the term therefore is an explicit logical link. Or the person might say, and then five years later, that happened, which is a temporal link. So we'll look at links a little bit and we will look a little bit at the margin. The left hand margin has a special role to play. And then earlier I was saying that the idea is pretty much a sentence, a subject, verb, object, and that will depend on the language. Some maybe subject object verb or even other orders, that depends and you will need to take your notes in the way that works best for you. So we will talk about the the SVO unit. It means subject, verb, object and then in another video, we will be looking at how the SVO is put into uh virtual columns and then the virtual columns are written in a diagonal form. And so on and so on and so forth. We have uh lots of concepts to teach and I really would like to teach them to you. I would like you to be able to become proficient. It takes um in one full year of practicing very hard, I uh was not quite proficient, at least not enough for the uh university I was going to and I had to do another year. So actually it took me two years. I I know you may think that that's a very long time, but it's not. You know, in your profession, you can find time to work on this with a colleague. There's a lot of work to do alone as well and it's worth it. You need consecutive for the exams at major international institutions. And to tell you the truth, learning consecutive and by consecutive, I mean with notes. You you can't really do what we normally call consecutive without notes. So by learning consecutive, you break things down. You examine the uh process closely and it makes you a much better simultaneous interpreter as well. So, you know, consecutive is not only going to with notes is not only going to get you out of a lot of situations where the speaker just won't stop talking and you're not going to be able to remember everything, you're going to have to take notes. Not only will consecutive with notes get you out of those situations, but it will make you a much better simultaneous interpreter as well. So let's let's move on and I what I would like to do is there is a video of me going through some of these techniques. It was at the American Translators Association from October 20th to 24th, 2020 online and I uh gave a talk there where I went over these techniques. And by the way, out of 41 uh uh evaluations, I got 31 excellent and 10 good and zero fair and zero poor. So I did I think people were quite happy with my talk. I might show you a little bit of that in the video as well. So now let's take a look at me at that conference explaining about the techniques that I just went over, going from chunking to the horizontal line to links and to the margin to SVO units.
[13:09]So, let's get going.
[16:53]And the virtual columns is something that we go to in another video for you. Um so I hope you learn something. I know it went by pretty quickly. Uh if you liked it, if you think you learned something, please give me a like below, subscribe to my channel and uh most of all, uh tell us what you think. Uh give us your comments or your questions down below. There's an area for comments and questions. Uh so uh please feel free and uh write what you really think. Uh and one more important thing, I have a free course on symbols. Uh symbols is something that's very handy because you can write so fast and it has such a clear uh meaning. So having symbols is extremely um handy. So uh take use the QR code that's appearing on the screen or use the code that is uh below this video on YouTube. And if you're seeing this on YouTube, and um click on that link and go to the platform where you can take a free course on symbols and I hope that will help you. And so, keep practicing, practice your consecutive, practice your simultaneous, use of the right techniques, take a look at the free course and symbols.
