Translation and interpreting are not only linguistic activities, but also to a large extent primarily activities of cultural
transfer. Transcultural communication displays complexity, diversity and readiness for conflict in communicative interaction, so
the interpreter/translator, as an intercultural mediator, is assigned a special communicative role in this regard. This article
examines how interpreters at the European Parliament deal with controversial language rendering evaluative components of political
statements as well as whether there is a rise in stress-related disfluencies in the interpretation of such statements and whether
intonation (dis)similarities between the source text and the interpretations occur in the context of cultural and lexical
know-how. Seven excerpts from four sessions of the European Parliament in the last six years and their interpretations into
Croatian, Slovene, English, French and German were analysed from the point of view of stress and culture. Deviations in pitch and
intensity levels of both the speaker and the interpreters were calculated and statistically compared in the light of differing
cultural know-how. The intonation results for these interpreting examples showed that all the interpreters followed the speaker’s
pitch deviations to a certain extent. Analysis of politically-controversial statements also revealed that more than 80% of the
interpretations selected contained stress-related disfluencies and almost 70% contained some form of discrepancy with the source
text at a lexical level. The interpretations therefore largely contained fewer negative evaluative components of controversial
language than the speakers in the European Parliament.
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Gerver, David. 1969 / 2002. “The Effects of Source Language Presentation Rate on the Performance of Simultaneous Conference Interpreters”. In The Interpreting Studies Reader, ed. by F. Pöchhacker; and M. Shlesinger, 53–66. London: Routledge.
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Munday, Jeremy. 2013. Evaluation in Translation. London: Routledge.
Nida, Eugene A.1945. “Linguistics and Ethnology in Translation-Problems”. Word 1 (2): 194–208.
Nolan, James. 2008. Interpretation. Techniques and Exercises. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Oléron, Pierre; and Nanpon, Hubert. 1965 / 2002. “Research into Simultaneous Translation”. In The Interpreting Studies Reader, ed. by F. Pöchhacker; and M. Shlesinger, 43–50. London: Routledge.
Pavlović, Nataša. 2015. Uvod u teorije prevođenja. Zagreb: Leykam.
Pelz, M.1999. Betonung in gelesenen Konferenzansprachen und ihre Bedeutung für das Simultandolmetschen: eine akustische Analyse (Englisch-Deutsch). Diploma thesis. University of Vienna.
2024. Expressive language in translation of books for children: a corpus-based study. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 100 ► pp. 235 ff.
Gao, Fei
2023. Getting the message in ‘Sound’ across at conference interpreting: a case study on rendering prosodic emphasis. Perspectives 31:6 ► pp. 1033 ff.
Jones, Alun
2021. “The Interpretation Zone”: European Geopolitics and the Interpretive Body. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111:4 ► pp. 1219 ff.
2022. Interpreting nonmainstream ideology (Euroscepticism) in the European Parliament. Perspectives 30:4 ► pp. 678 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.