PROBABILISTIC FORECASTING AS A SENSE INTERPRETATION TOOL IN SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETING

Abstract

Тhe paper explores the use of cognitive mechanisms and discursive strategies used by an interpreter in the course of the sense interpretation and its representation. The goal of the research is to discusses or even introduce new terms denoting the process of sense interpretation in the frame of cognitive-communicative theory, as well as to make an analysis of the interaction between inferencing and probabilistic forecasting as the key techniques of sense interpretation in simultaneous interpreting. Inferencing stands for the universal cognitive mechanism of translation/interpreting that boils down to generating inferences and implicatures on the basis of presuppositions. Presuppositional knowledge should be part of the interpreter’s thesaurus; in case of knowledge gaps they can be fi lled from the informational sources. In intercultural communication the interpreter acts as a recipient of the message in the source language (SL) and as its sender in the target language (TL). In the fi rst case he/she generates inferences, in the second – implicatures. In interpreting, and especially in simultaneous interpreting (SI) the process of generating inferences or implicatures or inferencing is closely related to the second key cognitive mechanism – probabilistic forecasting that continuously interacts with compression regarded on the one hand as a SI cognitive mechanism and an interpreter’s discursive strategy, on the other. The paper studies multilayer sense prompts in the SL text enabling an interpreter to make sense interpretation resorting to probabilistic forecasting. In SI this mechanism is based on inferencing and compression and becomes manifest in linear text roll-out. An interpreter also resorts to another discursive SI strategy, which is saucissonage or chunking. Texts for SI training and reports interpreted by professional interpreters at the UN General Assembly sessions serve as the materials for the research. The methods used in the paper are comparative method, introspection, observation and interpreting model simulation. The fi ndings and conclusions confi rm the instrumental role of probabilistic forecasting in sense interpretation in SI, as well as its close interaction with inferencing and discursive strategies of compression and saucissonage/chunking.