Korovkina Marina Ye.

The article deals with a complex interrelation of competence and interpretation factors in translation. In translation, interpretation implies both the understanding of the sense presented in the Source Language/Source Text (SL/ST) and its expression in the Target Language/Target Text (TL/TT) through the use of language­specific means. The limits or boundaries of interpretation are established by the invariant sense, and its adequate rendering requires a high level of professionalism. The competence factor in translation is intrinsically tied to the translator’s personality. If the translator’s language and conceptual thesaurus are poorly developed, this factor can produce a negative effect, as it limits the interpretation factor. Well­developed translator’s competences facilitate an in­depth understanding of presuppositions and implications in the SL, which serve as the basis for interpretation in translation and the criterion for the choice of transformations (shifts) used to cope with interlingual asymmetries and prevent interlingual interference. Interlingual asymmetries are present at all language levels and can cause interlingual interference that, in its turn, leads to language and translation errors. The competence factor produces impacts depending on the direction of translation: in the course of translation from a foreign language into the mother tongue the challenge is presented by the first phase of interpretation, viz. understanding, while in the course of translation from the mother tongue into a foreign language the difficulty lies in the choice of idiomatic means to express the invariant sense.

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.

The article highlights the contribution made by Geliy Chernov to researching simultaneous interpreting and describes the model of probability prediction and anticipation in simultaneous interpreting (SI) presented in his book first published in 1987. The model provides a description of SI cognitive mechanisms: probabilistic forecasting and anticipation, inferencing and compression, and the specifics of their interaction in the SI process. Probabilistic forecasting stands for the anticipation of sense (meaning) in the process of interpreting the text of the source language and it is based on inferencing. These cognitive mechanisms depend on the text function, information redundancy and text cohesion and coherence. Moreover, inferencing is based both on functional and discursive features of the text, as well as extralinguistic information related to the text. In this regard, Chernov may be considered as one of the pioneers in researching translation and interpretation in the Soviet Union and Europe alike: he was one of the first scholars to pay special attention to the pragmatic factors in simultaneous interpreting: the knowledge of a cultural context and background information, a specific subject­matter and a communicative situation in which simultaneous interpreting is used, which includes the topic of the event, participants and deixis. Further studies of the SI cognitive mechanisms from the perspective of cognitive linguistics seem a promising area of SI research.

The article explores the cognitive nature of sense interpretation in translation and the role of translator/interpreter who reveals the sense meant by the sender of the source language (SL) message and conveys it in the target language (TL). The objective of the article is to study the interaction of competence and interpretation factors in translation. The tasks closely related to the objective are as follows: to identify linguistic and extralinguistic factors that bring about the need for interpreting the sense in the SL, to show the specifics of interpretation in the LSP-texts and to present the typology of translation difficulties that can be coped with by sense interpretation. The findings of the research have shown that the translator is capable of performing his/her professional tasks only if he/she has a mastery of professional translator competences — the communicative, extralinguistic and specialized ones that enable him/her to resort to the key cognitive mechanism of translation — inferencing — that serves as a basis for interpreting sense in translation. While grasping the meaning of the SL message, the translator moves from the reference to sense and derives inferences. When reverbalizing the sense in the target language in moving from the sense to reference, the translator generates implicatures targeted at the TL message recipient. Inferences and implicatures are based on the common presuppositional knowledge of the SL message sender, TL message recipient and the translator who has to perform the approximation or interactive alignment of this knowledge. The interactive alignment is possible if the translator is well-versed in the knowledge of presuppositions in the language and conceptual word view of both the source and target languages. There are two types of presuppositional knowledge: that of language structures related to interlanguage asymmetries, including discursive features of the text cohesion and coherence that are also linguo-specific and referents (that connect language to extralinguistic situations), and that related to the extralinguistic situation (encyclopedic information about the world around us, culture and specific domains of knowledge and respectively translation). The article also presents the typology of the key translation difficulties caused by the inter-language asymmetries, which result in the need to interpret the sense in the SL message and to formulate IT in the TL using its linguo-specifi c means. These translation difficulties are illustrated with interesting examples from the LSP-texts that need a special precision in translation quite frequently understood by any beginner translator as the need to preserve the expression form in the TL, which leads to word-for-word translation or transcoding. The understanding of the role of interpretation in translation of LSP-texts helps to observe the norms of TL style and usage while at the same time it makes it possible to render the meaning and sense of the SL as was meant by the message sender.