The Objective In his book Simultaneous Interpretation: a Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis

Robin Setton (1999: 92) makes the following statement: “Our hypothesis, in line with recent work in Relevance Theory, is that hearers do not incorporate the directive and procedural elements in speech, like but, after all, let’s remember that and stress or word order variations, into their conceptual representations: such elements merely adjust the saliency of the content and direct us to inferences. The natural tendency for interpreters qua hearers (trainees, for example) is therefore not to represent and carry over this pragmatic dimension … Hence many trainees at first either merely report what content they have extracted, losing the ostensive guidance, or translate the source language procedural devices as if they encoded content, with infelicitous results.” There is some support for this view in the literature on interpreting pedagogy. A number of celebrated teachers of interpreting have placed considerable emphasis on the role of links within discourse and their importance for interpreting. Both Jean Herbert and Jean-François Rozan, authors of the first manuals of conference interpreting, were at pains to underline their importance. And whilst the concepts of ‘links ’ does not correspond exactly with the more sophisticated concept o