From presuppositions to implicatures: teaching simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

The article describes the key cognitive mechanisms of conference interpreting: inferencing, probabilistic forecasting/anticipation and compression built up in the course of an efficiently organized training which focuses on the development of communicative, extra-linguistic and specialized competences. The article explores a complex interaction of the mechanisms in question and their dependence on the level of mastery of professional competences by a simultaneous interpreter, which enables him/her to infer sense. Sense inferring and implicatures depend on the context. For example, the language and referential implicatures can be inferred from the language structures of the interpreted source text and its discursive elements (a narrow context), while the cognitive thesaurus-based implicatures related to extra-linguistic information of the text are derived from the broad pragmatic context. Implicatures, in their turn, are contingent on presuppositions that are also characterized in the article. Theoretic premises and conclusions are illustrated by interesting examples from the practice of conference interpreting.

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