Processus qui dégage le sens d’une chaîne sonore ou graphique grâce à l’association de significations linguistiques et de compléments cognitifs.

Comprendre un texte c’est faire appel à une compétence linguistique et, simultanément, à un savoir encyclopédique. La compréhension est une activité globale, difficilement subdivisible en phases distinctes ; je ferai néanmoins par commodité la distinction entre ses deux composantes, linguistique et encyclopédique, pour dissiper une confusion communément commise en particulier dans les manuels dits de traduction où les erreurs dues à une connaissance insuffisante de la langue étrangère sont traitées en erreurs de traduction.

Process in which sense is extracted from an aural or graphic sequence through the combination of cognitive inputs with linguistic meanings.

Understanding a text is to call on both linguistic competence and encyclopaedic knowledge simultaneously. It is a global activity which is difficult to break down into separate phases. For the sake of clarity however, I will make a distinction between the two components of understanding – linguistic and encyclopaedic – so as to do away with a common error made by so called translation handbooks where mistakes arising from an inadequate knowledge of the foreign language are treated as translation errors.

Understanding is conceived as an interpretive process geared to the generation of sense. According to ITT ( Interpretive Theory of Translation), experience in translation and interpreting has shown that linguistic knowledge alone does not suffice and it needs to be supplemented by other cognitive inputs (compléments cognitifs): encyclopaedic knowledge (bagage cognitif) and contextual knowledge (contexte cognitif), a type of storage which builds up from the beginning of the process of understanding. Additionally, ITT highlights the role of memory in the process of understanding and distinguishes between immediate memory, which stores words for a short time, and cognitive memory, which stores the whole range of knowledge possessed by an individual. The end product of the process of understanding is called sense and it results from the interdependence of all linguistic and non-linguistic elements which play a role in the process.