Cognitive processes in dialogue interpreting: on the interpreter’s monitoring at the local and global levels of discourse

This study is placed within the monitoring framework developed by Tiselius and Englund Dimitrova. It aims to determine whether dialogue interpreters exercise monitoring not only at the utterance level, but also at the level of a set of utterances. To test this hypothesis, Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory is combined with Grosz and Sidner’s Theory of Discourse Structure to shed light on cognitive processing of both the utterance and the global discourse purpose. This innovative interdisciplinary analytical apparatus is applied to two excerpts from authentic Russian-French interpreted psychotherapeutic sessions. The results confirm that interpreters monitor themselves and the other participants. They show that (self) monitoring is exercised at the local level of the utterance and at the global level of the discourse purposes of the two primary parties: interpreters monitor what is said, what is meant and why it is communicated. The study suggests that they exercise a cooperative meta-coordination of the interaction via the central cognitive process of monitoring, which leads them to produce collaborative renditions likely to maximise the relevance of the utterance and reinforce intra- and interdiscursive coherence.