| Popis: |
Growing awareness of the relevance of dialogue interpreting among emerging forms of interpretation has recently led to a surge of interest in the subject. The present research analyses topical coherence in dialogue interpreting in the context of the media, and specifically interpreted presidential debates and press conferences broadcasted by the Italian television. It aims at investigating the ways in which dialogue format and question/answer structure are managed and how their un/successful management influences the quality of the interpreter’s performance. The study draws upon conversational and error analysis, and is based on data collected in the CorIT (Media Interpreting Corpus) by Francesco Straniero Sergio (2007) and Caterina Falbo (2009). The first part of the analysis identifies the types of question featuring in American presidential debates, their Italian equivalent, the incidence of each type of question and the major difficulties they pose. The second part focuses on question/answer topical coherence in American presidential debates. It examines whether topical coherence is achieved, and in which ways its achievement is influenced by the type of question, the changes (omissions, substitutions and transformations) occurred in the interpreted question, the presidential debate structure and layout, the composition of the interpreters’ équipe and the turn-taking system. It would appear that changes do not always lead to an unsuccessful rendition and a consequent lack of coherence, since they are compensated by the very structure of the question type (if maintained). On the other hand, the omission of an interrogative clause is very likely to cause a lack of topical coherence, even if the whole segment was interpreted correctly, thus highlighting the prominence of a correct question rendition for the achievement of topical coherence within the question/answer group. The need for further research is pointed to, in order to broaden the scope of the analysis: the investigation can be applied to other forms of dialogue interpreting in the media, such as press conferences. The representativeness of the preliminary results could also be enhanced with the inclusion of interpreted debates which weren’t part of the original sample. The conclusions could then be applied to interpreters education and professional training. |
