OPTIMIZATION OF SIMULTANEOUS INTERPRETATION INTO RUSSIAN

The paper looks into ways of identifying and analyzing mistakes typical of simultaneous interpretation into Russian (not contingent on the source language). The strategies of simultaneous interpretation are first examined as a cause of misused speech patterns which result in information losses. The findings revealed the following factors affecting the quality of simultaneous interpretation: ambiguity of an utterance, a comic connotation impeding interpretation, lack of time to think a phrase over, loan translation, violation of literary norms. The study aims at developing theoretical foundations for didactic guidelines and a system of exercises to boost the quality of simultaneous interpretation into Russian. The analysis is based on the records of simultaneous interpretation of the world leaders’ speeches into Russian at the 72-nd UN General Assembly featured on the UN official site. The paper consists of three parts. The introduction describes relevant features of simultaneous interpretation as communicative activity: time limit, linear character, split attention of the interpreter; as well as the strategies of simultaneous interpretation which are more likely than other translation techniques to impair the quality of translation. The author’s classification of common mistakes is based on the assessment of the communicative effect retained in the target text. The body of the paper focuses on certain types of translation mistakes, their causes and recommendations as to how to avoid them. The author points out the downsides of probabilistic forecasting method, which entails extensive tautology, mistakes in defining functional sentence perspective and distorting grammatical sentence structure. It was also found that the linear strategy might provoke cognitive metaphoric mismatches in a complex sentence. It is argued that conference interpreters tend to ignore the basic differences in the linguistic maps of the world, looking instead for commonly matched words. Finally, the author concludes that good quality simultaneous interpretation calls for a comprehensive approach based on dynamic, cognitive, denotative, interpretative, communicative models of translation. This approach requires mutual effort of specialists from different research areas: Russian philology, translation and interpretation, cognitive science.