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Until now, Ghelly Chernov’s work on the theory of simultaneous
interpretation (SI) was mostly accessible only to a Russian-speaking
readership. Finally, Chernov’s major work, originally published in Russia
in 1987 under the title Основы Синхронного Перевода (Introduction to
Simultaneous Interpretation) and widely considered a classic in
interpretation theory, is now available in English as well. Adopting a
psycholinguistic approach to professional SI, Chernov defines it as a task
performed in a single pass concurrently with the source language speech,
under extreme perception and production conditions in which only a limited
amount of information can be processed at any given time.
Being both a researcher and a practitioner, Chernov drew from a rich
interpreting corpus to create the first comprehensive model of simultaneous
interpretation. His model draws on semantics, pragmatics, Russian Activity
Theory and the SI communicative situation to formulate the principles of
objective and subjective redundancy and identify probability prediction as
the enabling mechanism of SI. Edited with notes and a critical foreword by
two active SI researchers, Robin Setton and Adelina Hild, this book will be
useful to practicing interpreters in providing a theoretical basis for
appreciating the syntactic and other devices that can be used by both
students and experienced interpreters in fine-tuning their performance in
the booth.
Table of contents
Editors’ critical foreword ix
Foreword xxiii
Abbreviations and symbols xxix
1. The psycholinguistic approach to SI research 1
2. Speed, memory and simultaneity: Speech processing under unusual
constraints 11
3. The semantic and pragmatic structure of discourse 25
4. Semantic structure and objective semantic redundancy 39
5. Communicative context and subjective redundancy 57
6. A probabilistic anticipation model for SI 91
7. Theme and compression 107
8. Rheme and information density 121
9. Syntax and communicative word order 135
10. SI and Anokhin’s theory of activity 165
11. Anticipation and SI: An experiment 185
12. Conclusion 199
Notes 201
References 213
Appendix A. Buenos Aires corpus — UN, 1978, Experiment in Remote
Interpreting 223
Appendix B. United Nations General Assembly sessions 241
Appendix C. Texts with two types of test items used as input in an SI
probability anticipation experiment (Chernov 1978) 247
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