Breaking Ground in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies

This book focuses on interpretation corpora which is one of the major subjects of research in interpreting studies. It explores key issues such as corpus design and representativeness, as well as aims and challenges of the application of corpus-linguistics principles and methods to interpreting. Interpreting corpora represent a real challenge because of the very nature of the items they are composed of. The oral dimension, the unavoidable stage of transcription and the difficulties in relying on authentic data are only some of the aspects that make the creation of interpreting corpora a complex, challenging and time-consuming activity. The book discusses the theoretical problems and presents the working phases leading to the collection of five different interpreting corpora. The variety of approaches adopted by each research team highlights the fact that aims, interrogation methods and corpus design are intertwined. A survey of the studies carried out so far using these five interpreting corpora identifies data comparability as the core issue of corpus-based interpreting studies.

Auteur

Francesco Straniero Sergio (1959-2011) was Associate Professor at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori of the University of Trieste (Italy) where he taught simultaneous and consecutive interpretation from Russian into Italian. His latest research interests were in the field of corpus-based interpreting studies with special reference to dialogue interpreting and media interpreting, on which he had extensively published.
Caterina Falbo is lecturer at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori at the University of Trieste (Italy) where she teaches simultaneous interpretation from French into Italian and French linguistics. Her research interests concern interpreting theory and history, the analysis of interpreted discourse (conference interpreting and dialogue interpreting), as well as the design and collection of interpreting corpora.

Contenu

Contents: Francesco Straniero Sergio/Caterina Falbo: Studying interpreting through corpora. An introduction - Mariachiara Russo/Claudio Bendazzoli/Annalisa Sandrelli/Nicoletta Spinolo: The European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC): implementation and developments - Bendazzoli Claudio: From international conferences to machine-readable corpora and back: an ethnographic approach to simultaneous interpreter-mediated communicative events - Annalisa Sandrelli: Introducing FOOTIE (Football in Europe): simultaneous interpreting in football press conferences - Caterina Falbo: CorIT (Italian Television Interpreting Corpus): classification criteria - Eugenia Dal Fovo: Topical coherence in television interpreting: question/answer rendition - Francesco Straniero Sergio: Using corpus evidence to discover style in interpreters' performances - Marta Biagini: Data collection in the courtroom: challenges and perspectives for the researcher.