Comunicazione politica originale e mediata in tre lingue germaniche: inglese, neerlandese e tedesco

The study is based on three subcorpora of German speeches delivered by native speakers. DE NAZ encompasses speeches for a German audience, DE EUR comprises speeches at the European Parliament for an international audience and DE DOLM includes interpreted speeches of the German booth at the European Parliament. The aim of the study is to recognize differences and similarities in the German language used by the three groups of speakers and to identify features of interpretese in the interpreted subcorpus. Lexical variety, lexical density as well as high-frequency lexical words were used in the quantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis examined at syntactic level the coordination through und das and 16 other coordination combinations with und. The frequency in the use of five modal particles was the object of a second analysis, while the use of passive or modal forms with three elements was the last analysis carried out. Results indicate that the interpreted subcorpus is more similar to the international subcorpus in terms of lexical variety and higher word frequency, but not in terms of lexical density. It is the one with the highest number of verbs with three elements. Further studies are needed to corroborate or confute these trends

The present study is a corpus-based exploratory study aimed at comparing and contrasting three subcorpora of English interpreted vs. non-interpreted texts. Its general objective is to isolate any linguistic features of interpreted discourse – as opposed to original production – in the restricted set of texts analysed, which could be ascribed to interpretese, namely the way in which interpreters speak, irrespective of the language pair they are working in and the source text interferences they might be exposed to. The three subcorpora contain speeches delivered by native speakers in national and international settings, as well as speeches interpreted into English by professional interpreters working at the European Parliament. In the first part, the study focuses on the existing notions of simplification and explicitation as interpreting universals, to test whether interpreted speeches are actually simpler and more explicit than original ones. The second part analyses the distribution and use of different parts of speech (POS) in the three subcorpora as well as the use of figures of speech by the speakers in the three identified groups and settings. The results obtained seem to suggest that the time pressure interpreters are exposed to as well as the interpreting strategies adopted might play a decisive role in the production of the interpreted text. More specifically, interpreted texts, despite showing a lower degree of language variety, especially as concerns lexical words, appear to be more informative. Furthermore, their level of explicitness is similar to that of non-interpreted texts. Finally, the use of figures of speech appears to depend more on the speaker’s personal style or type of event rather than on the audience it is addressed to, i.e. national or international.

This chapter focuses on the intermodal and intralinguistic analysis of Dutch corpora made up of written and oral, translated and interpreted texts taken from the Dutch House of Representatives and the European Parliament. After providing a broad overview of the textual genre (the parliamentary questions), we went into greater detail about the methodology, which combined a quantitative approach based on corpus linguistics and insights obtained from Critical Discourse Analysis. The qualitative analysis was carried out on four levels: register, text cohesion, compound words and immigration terminology. The results showed that, on the one hand, there are a few differences between the three communicative contexts, but also between the oral and written modes. Interesting, on the other hand, are the results obtained from immigration speeches, with more politically correct language in the multilingual context of the EP, and the tendency in interpreted discourses to neutralize or reinforce some ideological aspects of the original discourses.

The paper aims at identifying similarities and differences among three realisations of a text genre in German: parliamentary questions submitted to the national parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundestag) as well as original and translated questions tabled by MEPs in the European Parliament. The research questions concerned a) the influence of the national and supranational institutional context on various features of the text genre, and b) the presence of ‘translationese’ in the translated texts. After providing and briefly discussing some lexicometric data, the contribution focuses on the lexical and textual level, notably on nouns (compound nouns and nomina actionis), adjectives (with positive or negative connotation) and connectives (conjunctive and pronominal adverbs). The quantitative-qualitative analysis has shown substantial similarities between the original and translated EU questions, thus confirming the role played by the institutional context. On the contrary, the results refuted some initial assumptions concerning the translated texts.

Within the genre “Written Parliamentary questions” in English, the main aims of this study were twofold: firstly, to verify the intra-linguistic variation of native language in different institutional social contexts, and secondly, to investigate the features of the language of translation as a ‘third code’. To do this, a comparable monolingual English corpus was created, made up of 3 subcorpora on the thematic areas of climate/environment, migration and transport, each of approximately the same size and referring roughly to the same time-frame: 1) questions in the House of Commons of the UK national Parliament (native English used in a monolingual context), 2) questions in the European Parliament by British and Irish MEPs (native English used in a multilingual context), and 3) questions in the European Parliament by Italian MEPs (translated English used in a translation context). The language features investigated were sentence length, rhetorical and sentence structure, inter- and intra-sentential connectives, personalisation, lexical density and variety, and, at the lexical level, abstract and connotated words. The analysis was both quantitative (Sketch Engine) and qualitative, and the results of the study generally confirmed the initial expectations, although for some features they may well have been biased by the stringent norms of the language of this genre within the UK Parliament.