From EPIC to EPTIC — Exploring simplification in interpreting and translation from an intermodal perspective

Silvia Bernardini, Adriano Ferraresi and Maja Miličević
University of Bologna | University of Belgrade
Abstract

This article introduces EPTIC (the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus), a new bidirectional (English<>Italian) corpus of interpreted and translated EU Parliament proceedings. Built as an extension of the English<>Italian subsection of EPIC (the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus), EPTIC is an intermodal corpus featuring the pseudo-parallel outputs of interpreting and translation processes, aligned to each other and to the corresponding source texts (speeches by MEPs and their written up versions). As a first attempt at unearthing the potential of EPTIC, we investigate lexical simplification replicating the methodology proposed by Laviosa (1998a; 1998b), but extending it to encompass both a monolingual comparable and an intermodal perspective. Our results indicate that the mediation process reduces complexity in both modes of language production and both language directions, with interpreters simplifying the input more than translators, and evidence of simplification being more lexical in English and more lexico-syntactic in Italian.

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Table of contents

Translation and interpreting studies have largely developed independently of each other, the former being concerned mainly with linguistic, literary and sociocultural perspectives and the latter focusing more on psychological (and more recently social/relational) aspects (see, e.g., the various articles in Schäffner 2004). However, it has also been pointed out, for instance by Gile (2004, 10) that they “share epistemological, methodological, institutional and wider sociological concerns” and that “[i]t, therefore, makes much sense for both disciplines to work together in spite of the differences.”

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