Ghelly Vassilievich Chernov (1929–2000) belonged to the first generation of post-war Russian conference interpreters servicing Soviet delegations at the United Nations through the Krushchev era, the height of the cold war, and decolonisation, and was Head of the Russian interpretation unit at the UN in NewYorkfrom1976to1982.InRussiaaselsewhere,seniorinterpreterstrained the next generation, a calling which fit neatly with a parallel academic career. With two doctorates (Translation in 1955 and Interpretation Theory in 1980), Chernov occupied successive posts, first at the Maurice Thorez Institute (later Moscow State Linguistic University) as Assistant Professor of English Trans lation and Interpretation, in 1967, then Chair of Interpretation from 1970, and later, from 1991, as President of the Moscow International Interpreting School (MIIS) beforereturningtoMSLU asProfessorofInterpretationTheory, History, and Practice from 1995 until his untimely death in 2000. Chernov’s main contribution to interpreting studies has traditionally been seen in his highlighting of redundancy as a key factor in SI comprehension and his emphasis on the psychological process of ‘probability’ anticipation (forward inferencing) as the central cognitive process making SI possible. His standing in the discipline and the originality of his work amply justify publication of his seminal contribution in English at this time. His decision to publish this work in English (as explained in the author’s foreword) was motivated partly by a concern to reach a wider readership and partly by a need to express affinities with some recent work in interpreting studies and in pragmatics, specifically the post-Gricean school of Relevance theory. Like a few other practitioners and trainers in Western Europe in the 1960s, Chernov was intensely curious about simultaneous interpreting, and had as many exciting intuitions and ideas as the next man or woman in the booth or trainer of conference interpreters. He did, however, take the step from speculation to empiricism, and looked for backing for his ideas in data gleaned from live interpreted events as well as laboratory experiments and the classroom. He obtained permission from his supervisors at the UN to tape speeches (in both the General Assembly and Security Council, as well as other agencies like the development forum UNCTAD), and their interpretation into different languages on parallel tracks. In particular, this valuable raw data allowed Chernov to compare the authentic production with the transcripts as edited for publication in the official UN record.1 The detailed measurements offered in his synchronised graphic representations of SI samples as evidence for his probability anticipation model were achieved using a laboratory installation of his own design (on which he took out apatent). But as some future corpus analysts were also to recognise, extracting in formation from such raw authentic transcripts also called for some theoretical descriptive apparatus. Chernov found his basic model of communication in Activity Theory, a philosophical and cross-disciplinary framework proposed by a group of Russian psychologists for the study of human behaviour and de velopment processes. Drawing on Anokhin’s research in neuropsychology and the writings of authors like Vygotsky and Leont’ev2 on language and thought, Chernovconceptualised SI as a complex goal-orientedcognitive activity which, like other forms of human behaviour, is dependent on perceptual attunement to significant changes in the external and internal environment and geared to a purposeful response– but in this case is performed in such extreme cognitive conditions that it must crucially depend on a minimum level of redundancy in the input, plus some additional knowledge, to enable anticipation and thus a more or less continuous synthesis of the verbal output. To apply this framework to his data, Chernov drew further on accounts of language and discourse in the work of Russian linguists like Zhinkin and Arutyunova, and on the functionalist theories of the Prague school as repre sented by Vilem Mathesius and contemporary successors like Wallace Chafe. The theoryofattentional andperceptualattunementtochanges ininformation from the environment as the main mechanism of comprehension and action seemed particularly compatible, when applied to language comprehension, with functional sentence analysis, which identifies peaks and troughs of in formation density in discourse in the alternation between its relatively recapit ulative component, the ‘theme’, and the ‘rheme’ which carries relatively ‘new’ information. This recourse to linguistic theory, relatively rare in interpreting research elsewhere at the time, reflects Chernov’s own linguistics background as well as his fruitful and longstanding collaboration with psycholinguists, in particular Irina Zimnyaya (see bibliography).
