The notes are the interpreter's tool and crutch in doing a high stress, accuracy-dependent job. View them that way and it all makes sense.
1. If it's Putin and Trump and each has an interpreter, the usual protocol is each side's interpreter interprets for that side.
Putin's interpreter interprets into Russian, Trump's into English. Anything else is highly irregular.
Each side's translator listens to make sure that the other interpreter's accurate, indicating acceptance or whispering things that got changed or altered in the interpretation.
Each side's interpreter primarily takes notes on what s/he has to repeat for the client. So the English interpreter would primarily take notes on what Putin said.
2. What notes are important to take depends on how things are run. If you're doing consecutive translation and the other side lectures for 20 minutes, you want notes. You can't remember 20 minutes of running text and if you leave stuff out, bad things happen. If it's short sentences, 2-3 at a time before you do your thing, you might write down a couple of words about the topic or main point. Or maybe nothing at all.
Writing down a whole sentence is a mistake. It wastes time and effort. And it often anchors you to the source language in ways that are hard to break free of. Often what you write down is in a mix of languages-or -you might get as into English as you can on the fly, or decide to take notes in Russian and save the thinking for later. And if it's a tricky word or idea you'd write down the Russian word as you wait for the context to build up and help you recast it in English.
3. The level of interpretation is important. If the other side goes for 20 minutes but the client says "just the facts" then that 20 minutes might be reduced to 5 or 10. The interpreter writes down the main points and just the facts. Not all the human interest stuff, repetition, background justification. If you want all the detail, it's about the same length as the original. Or perhaps you want to have background added to help in understanding, in which case 5 minutes from the other side could take 10 minutes to explain. (While the other side's interpreter whispers to *his* client what's going on.) I assume there are default settings for this. But if you need to explain context, you make a note of what you need to explain.
4. What the interpreter writes down is dependent on the interpreter's memory and level of expertise. While they're trained on how to take notes, that drifts a lot in practice very soon after starting work. During my coursework I'd use verb stem + n for any kind of deverbal noun. "Ed n" could be "education"; "ed r" could be a teacher, an educator, or an educational institution. If the talk was about nuclear disarmament, that would be circle-D. "Circle-D ag veri n n" would be "nuclear disarmament agreement verification process." No guarantee that if I saw something I took notes on I'd have any clue what the actual topic was an hour later.
Numbers are a big deal. They tend to be slippery. Abbreviations can be a nightmare. Consistency matters, so I'd bet that the interpreter would pick a word to translate a given Russian word and write the correspondence down to ensure consistency and hope that it's not a foolish choice.
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