International Communication through the Mind of an Interpreter

Abstract

Interpretation as a form of intercultural communication plays an important role in modern geopolitical conditions, hence the role of the interpreter as a mediator between languages and mentalities acquires even greater significance as high-quality interpretation ensures successful international communication. The authors focus on studying simultaneous interpreting as a cognitive process and set the goal of analyzing how the incoming message is perceived and processed in the mind of the interpreter and then transformed into a target language message. Applying the method of comparative cognitive transformation, the authors arrive at the conclusion that, since the interpreter operates on the cognitive level, the process of deverbalizing the source message is a transformation of the ordinary language into a language of thought, thus rendering the gist of the original can be achieved through identifying the underlying concepts in the source language message and finding correlations in the target language. Before attempting to formulate the target message, the interpreter should first deverbalize the original and get rid of its linguistic form, that is, cognitively imagine the sense of the message as a certain space of connections. Effective international communication with the target language recipients means that the interpreter needs to account for the pragmatics of the speech act and find a ready-made concise variant expressing a similar idea in the target language.