The Interaction Between Research and Training in Simultaneous Interpreting
Despite all endeavours to find consistent answers to a number of problems involved in the process of simultaneous interpreting (SI), many of them have remained unexplained, and a great many need to be corroborated by relevant experimental data.
The crucial question for SI is how syntactic (language-specific) and semantic (language-independent) information may be organised in the mind of a bilingual professional, such as an interpreter, and how this information is accessed and becomes available during this process.
SI is a phenomenon of both linguistic and cognitive interest. Its aim is not solely to establish linguistic equivalence between two languages, but mainly to communicate the meaning of the speech being heard
Decoding a message presented in one language and encoding it in another is a challenging task. The difficulty lies not so much in interpreting as in overlapping the normally separate functions of comprehension and production.
In the process of bilingual communication the interpreter is an essential figure who connects one knowledge system with another, but who shares neither the knowledge nor the motivations of the speaker(s), and who therefore relies on inferences from textual and situational content.
In this paper we focus on some problems of SI of a discussion at a scientific conference, the development of which greatly depends on the external conditions of the conference and is regulated by various extralinguistic factors.
Given that consideration of these issues necessarily requires us to explain the psycholinguistic nature of SI, we are also obliged to focus on the role of the Probability Prediction (PP) model, which answers many of the questions arising in the field of both interpreter training and SI in real-life situations. The PP model explains why SI can only be applied to communications characterised by an adequate level of redundancy, and discussion is a good model for demonstrating this.
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