Interpreting Football Press Conferences: The FOOTIE Corpus

Abstract

During the 2008 European football championships, the European Union of Football Associations (UEFA) assigned an interpreter to all participating teams for the duration of the tournament. All teams were bound by the regulations to hold one pre-match and one post-match press conference and the official languages always included English and the languages of the two teams. Simultaneous interpreting was chosen for this kind of communicative situation and English was used as a pivot language whenever necessary. The recordings of all the Italy press conferences held during EURO2008 have been transcribed to create the FOOTIE (Football in Europe) corpus, in order to carry out semi-automatic analyses of certain features of this kind of communicative situation. Football press conferences are an example of dialogic communication characterised by high interactivity, fast pace and the use of domain-specific language, and as such they pose specific challenges to the interpreter.