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THE ISSUE OF COHERENCE IN INTERPRETATION
Raximboyeva Iroda Xamdam qizi
Master student, Uzbekistan State World Languages University
This given publication work aims at revealing the role of coherence and its
development in the process of interpretation. The features of coherence and the
development of coherence are discussed and analysed in the thesis.
Some regard coherence as an internal mental phenomenon in both text
production and comprehension), while others see coherence as the result of the
interaction between texts and text users. Gernsbacher and Givon see coherence as
‘a property of what emerges during speech production and comprehension – the
mentally represented text, and in particular the mental processes that partake in
constructing that mental representation. Sanford and Moxey suggest that coherence
is the ‘result of the interpretation and integration of interpreted text elements by the
listener (reader) in relation to the intentions of a speaker and psychologically, people
tend to produce a ‘coherent mental representation’ of the text when they try to
comprehend it. On the other hand, de Beaugrande and Dressler claim that coherence
concerns how the concepts and the relations underlying a text are ‘mutually
accessible and relevant. They also address that to understand a text, people make
inferences based on their knowledge and expectations. However, without language
features, these cognitive representations would not be communicable. Lexical,
semantic and syntactic features are therefore needed, so that the interaction between
knowledge can take place. Gernsbacher & Givon suggest that, to construct
coherence, lexical knowledge
and ‘grammatical processing cues’ are vital in
achieving both ‘local and global coherence links. Hobbs suggests that coherence
markers such as anaphora are normally considered as clues to coherence. Sanders
and Noordman also suggest that coherence relations can be made explicit by the
use of linguistic markers.
In other words, coherence, no matter whether it comes from cognitive
representation of a text or the interaction between text and text users, relies on
linguistic features to display in a text. Coherence plays an important role in making
text comprehensible. Comprehending interpreted texts is no exception: the more
structured the text is, the easier it will be for the listener to follow it. Beaugrande and
Dressler (1981) propose cohesion and coherence as the two most significant of
seven standards by which the communicative value of a text can be measured.
Similarly, Scott and Souza explain that, `the more structured the input is, the easier
it will be for the reader to derive its underlying message' (1990: 53). Sanders and
Noordman also believe that people need coherence to understand a text (2000: 37).
Just as successful comprehension is necessary for a coherent representation of the
input text, it is reasonable to claim that a coherent underlying representation of the
evolving output text is a condition of successful production.
As an interpreter he has to know a great contribution of the term “coherence”
in the process of interpretation since without coherence listeners can not
comprehend the speech and may lead to another problem related to
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misunderstanding. Due to the fact that the role of coherence in the interpreter speech
is very valuable up to day it is the most discussed topic among interpreters since the
more strategies to develop the coherence the more clear, understandable
interpretation can be listened. Above mentioned ideas, facts show that in order to get
perfect coherence interpreter has to practice more and more.
As Sawyer states, ‘professional judgment alone is an insufficient basis for
decision-making
’ (2004: 104). As Ficchi suggests, it might be that `their teaching
lacks a theoretic or systematic basis’ (Ficchi, 1999: 202). There are two ways in
particular in which such a lack might affect the effectiveness of expert trainers. Firstly,
expert trainers may find themselves ‘at a loss to account for student performance and
to explain students’ difficulties’ (Moser-Mercer, 200: 339). They may not have the
‘appropriate meta-language to describe students’ performance’ (ibid). A lack of the
necessary meta-language can lead to impressionistic or unhelpfully vague criticism,
perhaps claiming, for instance, that an interpretation failed to carry the message,
despite the presence of most of the original information. Of course, even when the
expert trainer has access to such a meta-language, it is essential that this is
effectively shared with the trainees in order to allow them to benefit from comments.
Secondly, expert trainers often evaluate student performances and diagnose
problems from the
‘vantage point of their own interpreting practice’ (ibid.; Ficchi,
1999: 202 makes a similar observation). The comparisons which are likely to
come from such a vantage point may not be very fair to trainees, as they are not yet
fully fledged professional interpreters and their performance is not ready to be
evaluated by professional standards.
It can be concluded that coherence is a rather complex phenomenon, which
concerns with every aspect of the communication process, both verbal and non-
verbal. Studies cannot embrace only one of the approaches and ignores the other in
that both of them reveal the nature of discourse coherence from different
perspectives. From the coherence-as-linguistic phenomenon point of view, it can be
learned that what linguistic devices are functioning and how they are used to organize
sentences into a coherent discourse. Simultaneously, it is quiet not enough to
investigate discourse coherence as a static product of communication since
communication is a dynamic process of interaction between communicator and
audience, during which language serves as a medium. Therefore, in order to explore
the nature of discourse coherence, these two aspects must be combined together. It
should not be the case of either/or, but the complementation of each other. It is both
a static and dynamic process. A coherent discourse can not only be achieved by
linguistic device, but also by mutual efforts of participants in communication. So
attention must also be paid to the function of non-verbal factors in the dynamic
process of communication.
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