Teaching Note-Taking to Beginners Using a Digital Pen

Abstract

Teaching consecutive interpreting comprises the teaching of many different skills, inter alia note-taking.  Translation scholars such as Gile [1983], Matyssek [1989], Andres [2002] and Gillies [2005] have drafted a plethora of manuals, books and articles that suggest different rules, structures, detailed symbols and abbreviations for note-taking.
Teachers of consecutive interpreting face the difficulty of analyzing the students’ notes, giving direct feedback  and personal advice at class, often with very limited time at their disposal. Orlando [2010; 2015] suggests using digital pen technology in note-taking training to concentrate on the process of note-taking itself in order to observe improvements and strategies needed to acquire this skill. Thanks to this technology, teachers and students can reflect upon the reasons why students noted in a certain way and used a particular structure.
This article sets out to describe how this approach has been tested at note-taking classes at Innsbruck University, with particular attention given to the analysis of different aspects of the process. The aim of the article is to demonstrate if a digital pen can be useful in training, what are the main advantages in terms of efficacy of teaching and time efficiency inter alia and if it can be used at the beginning of a note-taking course.