Inferencing and Functional Approach to Text: Based on Simultaneous Interpreting

Abstract

A prompt exchange of information requires a thrift in expressive means and makes relevant the processes of verbalizing and reverbalizing sense in bilingual communication. The analysis of various communicative situations in simultaneous interpreting both from English into Russian and Russian into English show specific parameters of generating a text in the target language, which differ from the traditional author’s text generation. The study’s objective is to introduce the notion of inferencing (in the Russian linguistic studies the term inference is used) as a special linguistic tool of eliciting and interpreting sense in the process of translation/interpreting. General linguistic understanding of inference and implication refers to the direct communication between a sender (speaker) and recipient (listener) that produces interrelated notions via independent inferences. The method of sampling and comparing the inferences accumulated empirically and of simulation modelling of simultaneous interpreting can demonstrate that a distinctive feature of indirect communication via interpreter is multi-component system of additional cognitive procedures at the stage of interpreting. The simultaneous interpreting outcomes as the material of research indicate that conveying the sense in interpreting is based on a dynamic process of inferencing, which is a creative search of implicatures and their reverbalization, with an interpreter resorting to his/ her own thesaurus-based resources (mental lexicon) related to the knowledge of domain, which is a subject of communication. The distinctive parameter of inferencing in interpreting is both the generation of inferences and implicatures and a cognitive analytical process of selecting facts from presuppositional knowledge. The study outcomes show that the cognitive analytical process of inferencing is closely related to probabilistic forecasting, which presupposes an accumulation by an interpreter of a sufficient individual base of verified intuitive solutions and referential languagebased interpretations and presuppositions. The study makes a conclusion that of crucial importance for interpreting is inferencing, rather than inference as such.

Keywords

• inference
• implication
• implicature
• inferential knowledge
• inferencing
• probabilistic forecasting
• compression
• simultaneous interpreting