ABSTRACT_ The (politics of) translation (of politics) E.
D AL F OVO
Eugenia Dal Fovo, Ph.D.
DIUSLIT – Department of Law, Languages, Interpretation and Translation Studies
U NIVERSITY OF T RIESTE
E MAIL : edalfovo@units.it
T ITLE : P OLITICS INTERPRETED ON SCREEN . A corpus-based investigation on the interpretation of televised presidential debates
K EYWORDS : presidential debates; corpus-based interpreting studies; television interpreting; conference interpreting
A BSTRACT (250 WORDS ):
The present paper illustrates a corpus-based analysis conducted on two multimedia parallel corpora,
USDEB.04 and EUDEB.14. Both corpora are collections of televised political speech events and their interpretations broadcast live on television: the three 2004 Bush/Kerry presidential debates in
USDEB.04; and the third 2014 debate between the candidates to the presidency of the EU Commission in EUDEB.14 (interpretations are performed by the SCIC interpreters’ équipe broadcast on the
Eurovision channel and by Italian TV interpreters broadcast live by the Italian national broadcaster
Rainews24 respectively). Both corpora are sub-corpora of CorIT, the Italian Television Interpreting
Corpus (Straniero Sergio & Falbo 2012; Dal Fovo 2012). Unlike Italian TV interpreters, SCIC interpreters follow norms and conducts that are conventionally associated with quality criteria applied to conference interpreting, and that little have to do with TV’s ethos of entertainment.
Furthermore, SCIC interpreters work in praesentia (Falbo 2009). Television interpreting (TI) as professional activity, especially in absentia, involves setting-related factors (inter al. Kurz 2003;
Pöchhacker 1997; Mack 2001) that require interpreters to follow norms and apply strategies that ensure their conveying of infotainment. Once identified discourse elements which operationalise the principle of infotainment, the aim is to verify the presence –or absence– of such elements in the two types of interpreted texts (ITs). The different “habitus” (Katan/Straniero Sergio 2003: 144) displayed by each équipe highlights the relevance of the context in defining appropriateness of rendition, thus raising a series of questions regarding the concept of quality in (TV) interpreting.
R EFERENCES :
Dal Fovo , Eugenia (2012) Simultaneous interpretation on television: the case of the question/answer group in the 2004 U.S. presidential debathon. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Trieste, http://www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/10078/1/Dal%20Fovo_THESIS.pdf
Falbo , Caterina (2009) Un grand corpus d'interprétation : à la recherche d'une stratégie de classification. In Paissa, Paolo / Biagini, Marta (eds.) Doctorants & Recherche 08. La recherche actuelle en linguistique française. Milano: Lampi di stampa, 105-120.
Katan , David / Straniero Sergio , Francesco (2003) Submerged Ideologies in Media interpreting. In
Calzada Pérez, Maria (Ed.) Apropos of Ideology. Manchester: St.Jerome, 131-144.
Kurz , Ingrid (2003) Live TV interpreting − A high-wire act?. In Collados Aís, Àngela / Sabio Pinilla, José
Antonio (ed.) Avances en la investigación sobre interpretación, Granada, Comares, 159-171.
Mack , Gabriele (2001). Conference Interpreters on the Air - Live Simultaneous Interpreting on Italian
Television. In Gambier, Yves / Gottlieb, Henrik (eds.) (Multi)Media Translation. Concepts,
Practices and Research. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 125-132.
Straniero Sergio , Francesco / Falbo , Caterina (2012) Studying interpreting through corpora. An introduction. In Straniero Sergio, Francesco / Falbo, Caterina (eds.) Breaking ground in corpusbased interpreting studies. Bern: Peter Lang, 9-52.
B IOSKETCH :
EUGENIA DAL FOVO is Adjunct Professor at the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and
Translation Studies (DIUSLIT) - University of Trieste, where she teaches dialogue and consecutive interpreting. She previously taught consecutive interpreting at the Department of Humanities of the
University of Macerata. She also works as conference and healthcare interpreter. She holds a Ph.D. in
U NIVERSITAT DE LES I LLES B ALEARS – P ALMA , J UNE 27-28, 2016 1

ABSTRACT_ The (politics of) translation (of politics) E.
D AL F OVO
Interpreting and Translation Studies. Her Ph.D. thesis was awarded the 2015 CIUTI Ph.D. Award. Her investigations initially focused on corpus-based analyses of television interpreters’ performances in simultaneous mode. Her current research interests also include the observation of interpretermediated face-to-face interaction in TV, healthcare and other community settings. She is the author of the entries on “Media Interpreting” and “Talkshow Interpreting” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Interpreting Studies.
U NIVERSITAT DE LES I LLES B ALEARS – P ALMA , J UNE 27-28, 2016 2