In our Rome classroom a picture of a church was being projected onto a large screen while tales related to it were being told. We had been split into two groups, one facing the screen and the other with their backs to it. The former could readily peg what they were hearing to the picture: the asymmetrical spires, the lone golden crown and window, the red bricks, etc. The members of the other group had to construct a picture from scratch as they listened.

As I was among the lucky ones with that big church right in front of my eyes, I can only conjecture that colleagues in the other group were indeed constructing a picture in their mind’s eye. But I think it’s a safe bet as I know them to be trained interpreters. What I know for sure is that with the church in sight the otherwise disconnected bits of the narration could be readily linked. Though the accounts spanned centuries and diverse fields of knowledge, from major wars to bourgeois mannerisms, from architecture to quarries, they were held together by the picture. Even without taking notes, repeating them didn’t feel like much of a challenge.

The same ease was clearly felt by my class when I ran them through the exercise a few weeks later. Students who had been troubled by not being able to read their notes, i.e. could not bring to mind what their notes were supposed to mean, were surprised by how well they remembered everything. Good news: they do not need a magic memory-boosting pill after all; the potential to reproduce a statement a few minutes long (with a mnemonic aid) is within them. The question is how to turn that potential into reliable performance.

This brings us to the bad news: the elements of a typical speech that a conference interpreter deals with cannot be so neatly organized into a vivid image. To the extent that there is indeed a big picture embedded in any coherent speech, it is a different kind of picture. Instead of being composed of images, it is made of points woven into a message with the thread of logic. If one has no idea of the intended message, looking at chunks of notes and trying to interpret them would feel like looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and trying to put them together without knowing what picture they are supposed to form. Frustrating? Naturally.

The challenge for trainers is to enable students to see the big picture even as they identify the lexical-grammatical elements of a statement while listening and taking notes. Identification with the merits of a message-oriented approach evolves hand in hand with ability to actually follow it. How do you expect someone who is not able to grasp the message and thus has never experienced a sense of lucidity when it comes to deciphering their notes to be a firm believer in the power of seeing the big picture?

Even after the exercise described above, students might still be clueless about how to construct the abstract picture demanded by a speech. Mine intuitively saw the difference between the church exercise and conference discourse: the latter usually does not come with a ready image as familiar as a church. Every one of my students has seen churches, but not all have a trained ear for discourse structures. So even if they believe me when I say seeing a structural map and understanding the message not only helps but is essential to interpreting, they don’t just start doing the same. Because they don’t know how.

It seems that my students are not alone in this. My fellow trainers at the seminar also welcomed pedagogical devices such as breaking a run-on speech text into sections, piecing together disordered sections into a coherent speech, delivering a short speech of a designated structure to a partner who must identify the structure or sketching out the structure of a speech with the briefest notes possible. Not only did we have fun doing this, but we also appreciated the utility of these “games” in making students more familiar with speech structures and thus creating a reservoir of prototype schemas for ready employment, much like using the generic structure of church to inform incoming data about its features.

Grasping the big picture does not obviate the need for notes, especially when it comes to details. The thing is that an understanding of the message arrived at through active analysis does not readily fade, while the details do, sometimes within seconds. That is where notes beat human memory. At this micro level things get technical, and symbols, abbreviations, formatting, referential lines and the like - the tried and true approach to generating unambiguous notes with minimum writing – come into play. The teacher will introduce the building blocks, but students can adapt and personalize the pieces in ways that work best for them.

Above and beyond note-taking, though, they do need to establish the big picture of the discourse. Without that the most meticulously crafted notes won’t necessarily result in an interpretation that makes sense. I for one have sometimes heard in my classroom nonsense sentences made out of copious notes covering all possible elements of a particular unit. Hardly surprising if you consider how a sentence, even written out long hand, could well be read with the wrong stress were there no knowledge of the context.

Now let’s rewind to the beginning of the seminar: each of us had scribbled a problem on our nametag and we were exchanging ideas about them. One problem was reading back one’s notes. Another one was memory, which upon probing, meant students not remembering what they had noted. Why can’t students make sense of their own notes? Given that we were not talking about sloppy handwriting, and assuming that listening comprehension is solid when they don’t have to take notes (a big assumption), what keeps them from reformulating a sentence out of say, where subject, verb, object are all noted? 1 Could it be that our dear student was too busy writing to pay attention to how this bit logically grew out of what came before? How it fit into the big picture?

Handan Bao () is a conference interpreter for Chinese and English. She teaches at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo (China) campus.

1 The notes represent a segment of a talk by a Chinese philanthropist on earthquake relief fund allocation in China. This segment was preceded by an account of the current scenario, where funds raised by NGOs are mostly distributed through government bodies, and a brief comment on the transparency problem. In the notes, (1) is for government; (2) could mean dominance, majority, master, etc; (3) could mean sent, part, distribute, score, etc; (4) represents money in general, in this context, the only relevant kind of money is earthquake relief funds; (5) signals an urge to change (the Chinese character means change). After this part, the speaker went on to talk about conditions necessary for reducing government dominance in fund allocation, which constitutes further contextual cues that, if understood in connection to the presented part, are available to student interpreters.