Décalage e unità di senso nelle interpretazioni simultanee dall’arabo in italiano

Abstract

The paper has been inspired by a personal curiosity to study simultaneous interpreting fromArabic into Italian. On the basis of live-satellite simultaneous interpretations, the analysis focuses on a specific simultaneous interpretation element: the ear-voice span. This yardstick has been related to the unit of speech, that is to say the speaker’s part of speech corresponding to the interpreter’s silence, which is the starting point of the interpreter’s translation. All potential syntactic, semantic and pragmatic clues of the unit of speech have been taken into account during the study. Thanks to this procedure, the main elements determining the ear-voice span in the analysed simultaneous interpretations have been pointed out. The results of the paper show how ear-voice span – and the subsequent shaping of the unit of speech – is not strictly connected to and determined by Arabic syntax. Further non-syntactic elements may highly influence the length of the décalage. As a matter of fact, the importance of pragmatic and prosodic clues has been confirmed.