REDUNDANCY AND IDENTIFIABILITY AS CRUCIAL ELEMENTS FOR ANTICIPATION IN SI

Abstract

Anticipation is a crucial aspect in the activity of simultaneous conference interpreting (SI). The interpreter has to predict, based on linguistic, cognitive, situational, and pragmatic inferences, the direction in which the speaker develops the discourse, in order to avoid informational overload and be able to recreate in the target language (TL), the message uttered by the speaker in the source language (SL). One theoretical model that aims to describe the mental processes behind SI it that of Ghelly Chernov. Influenced by the Russian school of psycholinguistics, Chernov views SI activity as a mental process involving, besides linguistic competences, the ability of the interpreter to ‘make sense’ of the speaker by correctly identifying the relevant new information, the rheme, and how this fits into the broader referential framework of the discourse, provided by its theme. Its success relies heavily on the redundancy of the discourse,
manifested by iteration and interdependence, which allows the interpreter to make inferences based on the information gradually being revealed by the unfolding speech. A contributing factor to redundancy is the identifiability of referents in the discourse, as theorized by Wallace Chafe. This paper points at the potential complementarities of the two theoretical approaches.