Simultaneous Interpreter Professional Competence in a Cognitive and Discursive Paradigm

Abstract

The paper presents a simultaneous interpreter professional competence that consists of three components – communicative, extralinguistic and procedural or specialized (sub)competences. It is focused on the third component, which includes the abilities of inferencing, probabilistic forecasting and compression, specifically required for simultaneous interpreting (SI). Inferencing is a two-staged process of retrieving assumptions with regards to composing invariant senses, which means deriving inferences of the message in the source language (SL) and generating implicatures in the target language (TL). Probabilistic forecasting is based on the analysis of the invariant sense prompts in the SL message and boils down to anticipating invariant sense evolvement in the context. It is closely related to compression – an ability to eliminate the redundant information and to condense the retrieved invariant sense in the SI for linguistic and extralinguistic reasons, such as interlanguage asymmetries between the source and target languages and an acute shortage of time because of the speaker’s speed. Moreover, compression is one of the key discursive strategies used by the simultaneous interpreter in speech production. These information processing abilities stand for the SI inherent cognitive features or mechanisms and cognitive-and-discursive strategies employed by the simultaneous interpreter in order to meet the pragmatic needs of a SI communicative situation. Descriptive, comparative, model simulation, introspection and observation methods were used for the research task realization. The outcomes of the study show that the above mentioned three cognitive mechanisms, discursive strategies and abilities closely interact in the SI; it is manifested through inferences and implicatures generated on the basis of presuppositions. Relying on his/her professional competence and employing discursive strategies of inferencing, probabilistic forecasting and compression, the simultaneous interpreter chooses the adequate language means to render invariant sense in its transition from the source to target languages. The choice is facilitated by presuppositional knowledge rooted in the worldview of the source and target languages, constituting the simultaneous interpreter’s language and conceptual thesauri. Another important factor assisting SI cognitive processes and the choice of discursive strategies is the analysis of text functions that makes it possible to elicit presuppositions helpful for inferencing and probabilistic forecasting.