The Interpreters' Newsletter n. 16 - 2011

Live television interpreting has increased in recent years and is commonly seen as one of the most difficult and stressing forms of interpreting. However, both the actual difficulty and stress involved highly depend on the physical and technical conditions the interpreter has to face in every particular situation. The main goal of the present paper is to examine a corpus – which partly draws on the author’s professional experience in various international events broadcast in the media – of digital video recordings of live interpretations from Spanish and international TV channels to discuss the backstage conditions of the interpreting assignments. Backstage conditions (a new concept introduced in this paper) are understood as a factor affecting quality according to two salient variables: visibility and exposure. Since they will determine the quality standards achievable in each particular case, and the quality of the interpreter’s performance will thus be negotiated and assessed accordingly, awareness of all actors involved in the process shall be raised with regard to their relevance. Further stages of the current project will expand the corpus into a more comprehensive one that will eventually become STICor (Spanish Television Interpreting Corpus).

During the past twenty years, interpreters have been an active force in broadcasting TV news in Japan. This article looks at how this mode of interpreting has taken root in Japan and then examines the constraints, requirements and challenges for the future. It first reviews how interpreting television news from English into Japanese is performed on regular news programs. Interpreting Japanese news programs into English is also discussed in light of the remarkable events of 2011. The two essential constraints in TV news interpreting are the short preparation time and the undefined audience. More often than not, prepared texts are not available and preparation time is extremely limited. Broadcast interpreters need to be flexible and to be equipped with not only linguistic ability but also with a broad knowledge of current affairs. They also need to be skilled at conveying the news using their voice as a tool. To convey the news accurately and intelligibly, broadcast interpreters need to constantly update not only their linguistic ability but also their background knowledge and announcer-grade speaking skills. As a result of the increased prominence broadcast interpreting as a profession has its own niche as part of news reporting in journalism.

If research on the role of spoken-language interpreting in global news coverage is limited, the role of signed-language interpreting in this area is news in itself! This joint paper focuses on an aspect of international communication for Italian profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing people: global news coverage through simultaneous Italian Sign Language (LIS) interpreting on television. It looks in particular at the transfer of news related to global conflicts across the linguistic and cultural divide between the deaf and hearing worlds. A comparative linguistic analysis was conducted on a small multimodal corpus (in both spoken Italian and simultaneously interpreted LIS) of brief video recorded Italian television news bulletins, to investigate textual features of interpreted news and the main linguistic challenges facing sign language interpreters in the domain of conflict such as terminology, foreign loans, foreign proper, toponymic and institutional names. These are some of the aspects covered by this paper to reveal how news crosses the international ‘sound barrier’.

Simultaneous interpreting is recognised to be an extremely complex cognitive activity placing high demands on linguistic abilities, extra-linguistic knowledge and communication skills of those who perform it. Specific difficulties identified in literature as the main factors contributing to the complexity of the interpreters’ task include high information density, especially if combined with a high speed of talk and/or not well structured utterances, proper names, figures, culture-bound references, humorous, ironical or highly emotional passages, unfamiliar accents and pre-prepared speeches read out with no chance for the interpreter to have access to them. Simultaneous interpreting for live media ceremonies entails even more difficulties due to the peculiar features, structure and time constraints of the broadcast event. This study discusses simultaneous interpreting of two Academy Award Ceremonies – in 2000 and 2010 – focusing on two specific difficulties: proper names and culture-bound references. The interpreters’ performance is analysed using rendition categories based on the work by Wadensjö (1998). Results are discussed in the light of previous studies and Relevance Theory

The present paper aims at exploring the features pertaining to the textuality, usability and functionality of simultaneous interpreting (SI) in the news making and news reporting process. SI will be discussed with focus on the interplay between SI and other language transfer modes (voice-over, subtitling, free commentary/narration, hybrid forms), which may be used as an alternative to SI; synchronically co-exist (on different TV channels) or diachronically follow each other in the coverage of the same event (on the same TV channel). Language mediation will be investigated in the context of Italian television, which often enables viewers to select the interpreter(s) and/or the transfer mode through which they wish to watch a news event. The analysis is based on data drawn from CorIT (Italian Television Interpreting Corpus) (cf. Straniero Sergio 2007; Falbo 2009).

“Politics is quintessentially a language game”, as Geis (1987: 13) wrote. As such it has its own rules, which politicians are expected to abide by, especially when addressing a television audience during a debate. Interpreters having to cope withmedia events1 are required to act professionally while remain pragmatically and interactionally aware of the situation. Therefore, they may use a number of linguistic strategies and devices primarily aiming at accomplishing specific communicative functions. However, such process may lead to a change in the pragmatic level of the interpreted text (IT) if compared to the original one (OT). This paper aims at analysing the impact discourse modalisation has on ITs. The research carried out on simultaneous interpreting (SI) of five American presidential debates ranging from 1984 to 2008 would suggest that modality markers used in the target language may emphasise the pragmatic level of ITs, whereas omissions and inaccurate renditions of speakers‘ statements would determine a mitigation of the emotional impact as perceived by interpretation users.

Against the background of current literature on media interpreting and journalism, this paper presents an analysis of a corpus obtained from the Italian state TV programme Unomattina in 2001. The corpus was built with the aim of comparing two roles: journalists as in-the-field professionals reporting the latest news on the Iraq war from abroad (Journalists-as-Journalists: JJ); interpreters watching CNN and Al Jazeera from a booth in the studio, and giving journalistic updates from these to the Italian audience (Interpretersas- Journalists: IJ). If we assume that audiences judge the journalists and interpreters by the same standards, differences between JJ and IJ could be seen as failings on the part of IJ to be as effectively telegenic as their JJ counterparts. Combining notions from Conversation Analysis, Sociolinguistics, and Media Studies this paper sets out to characterise interpreters’ linguistic behaviour when they play this hybrid role of interpreter/journalist. Are there linguistic differences between JJ and IJ? And are there additional skills interpreters need to develop in order to be more telegenic and better meet the needs of TV programmers and audiences?

This paper presents a selection of empirical studies of television interpreting in the Austrian context. Following an introductory review of the unique features of TV interpreting and the rationale for studying it, the main methodological options, ranging from observational to experimental approaches, are briefly discussed. The paper then reports empirical analyses, several of them conducted in the framework of recent MA theses completed at the University of Vienna under the author’s supervision. These examples serve to demonstrate the significant potential of research using corpora of authentic high-exposure interpreting and highlight the great variety of issues to be investigated, which range from the distinction between different target-language varieties to product-oriented analyses of rhetorical devices and to experiments eliciting TV interpreting consumers’ preferences and attitudes.

Television Interpreting and Conference Interpreting have always been regarded as profoundly different in terms of the expected performance and the interpreting strategies utilized. Television interpreting is a multi-faceted activity, requiring a particular mind-set and special communicative skills: television interpreters produce their own text, in an attempt to ensure coherence and convey the same effect that the speaker wants to obtain, with little or no possibility of using décalage due to the pragmatic context. The paper investigates how the flow of discourse is managed by television interpreters, with a special focus on the use of prosody and discourse markers. The analysis is conducted on a corpus of recorded texts, interpreted in simultaneous mode by a professional conference interpreter, working for public television. The typology of the interpreted event is the press conference interview, characterized by a rapid question and answer format. Through this analysis, we shall outline a profile of television interpreters and their interpreting strategies.

The present paper is a review of MA theses conducted on data collected in CorIT – Corpus of Television Interpreting (Straniero Sergio 2007, 2012; Falbo 2009, 2012), written by students of the SSLMITs of Trieste and Forlì between the years 2000 and 2011. It provides a snapshot of the number of possible issues to be investigated within the field of Television Interpreting Studies by relying on real-life data, with the aim of taking stock of what has been observed so far, as well as highlighting the great research potential of this branch of studies and the validity of the corpus-based research approach. CorIT MA theses cover a wide range of aspects, such as communication setting/discourse genre, discourse format, native vs. non-native, strategies and errors, interpreter’s role and profile, specific interpreting issues and potentially problematic elements, interactional and pragmatic aspects.

TV interpreting is a special form of interpreting for several reasons. Not only the challenges interpreters are faced with, but also the expectations towards their performance as well as the technology involved differ greatly from conventional conference interpreting. Unlike public broadcasting companies in Germany, the European culture channel ARTE (Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne) works with interpreters on a regular basis and has its own language service. A comprehensive survey was conducted amongst TV interpreters working both for ARTE and other broadcasters. Additionally, editors and TV interpreters from public television in Germany were questioned. These studies as well as insights gained from ARTE staff paint a clear picture of interpreting for public television in Germany and highlight the differences between ARTE and other broadcasting companies.