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The following chapter introduces PINC — the Polish Interpreting Corpus, a Polish-English and English-Polish corpus of short European Parliament speeches and their interpretations. The uniqueness of PINC, apart from its language combination, consists in careful balancing of mode of delivery, in rich metadata, interpreter identification and availability of a strictly controlled subcorpus of retour interpretations. The chapter also briefly presents custom-built tools used in the making of the corpus, especially for transcription, text-audio alignment at word level and interpreter identification. To showcase PINC's potential for analysing various aspects of simultaneous interpreting, we examined fluency parameters, such as speaking rate and pauses, in the Polish-English subcorpus. We found that interpreting speed was modulated by the source text speaking and articulation rate and the target text compression rate. Target texts had fewer but longer silent pauses and more numerous and longer filled pauses. Together with shorter runs, understood as utterances uninterrupted by pauses, this suggests more fragmented delivery of interpretations. We also found interesting individual differences in compression rate with the majority of interpreters producing interpretations longer than the source texts.

Several works have suggested that both interpreting and translation tend to favour linguistic choices typically considered more formal. Observations concerning the degree of formality of these forms of language mediation, however, have been made within studies mostly focusing on different phenomena, such as standardization or conventionalization. In this paper, we report on a quantitative and qualitative analysis focusing specifically on formality in interpreted language. We take into account native and interpreted speeches delivered at the European Parliament (EP) and collected in the English subcorpora of the EPIC and EPTIC corpora. We compare the examined English varieties to one another, taking into account the mode of delivery of the speeches, i.e. whether they were read out from a written text or delivered impromptu. Our hypothesis is that interpretations of speeches read at the EP are located at the far end of the formality spectrum compared to speeches delivered impromptu by native English MEPs. Unlike previous work, we rely on formality indicators identified by triangulating human judgements and specific linguistic features derived bottom-up from a corpus, based on the MuPDAR[F] approach. The analysis provides partial support for the hypothesis, showing that interpreted texts are generally predicted as being characterised by a high level of formality, irrespective of the actual mode of delivery of their source text. We conclude by commenting on the linguistic features that were found to contribute the most to making interpreted speeches diverge from native ones.

Introduction to the volume

The purpose of this book is to showcase a diverse set of directions in empirical research on mediated discourse, reflecting on the state-of-the-art and the increasing intersection between Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (CBIS) and Corpus-based Translation Studies (CBTS). Undeniably, data from the European Parliament (EP) offer a great opportunity for such research. Not only does the institution provide a sizeable sample of oral debates held at the EP together with their simultaneous interpretations into all languages of the European Union. It also makes available written verbatim reports of the original speeches, which used to be translated. From a methodological perspective, EP materials thus guarantee a great degree of homogeneity, which is particularly valuable in corpus studies, where data comparability is frequently a challenge. In this volume, progress is visible in both CBIS and CBTS. In interpreting, it manifests itself notably in the availability of comprehensive transcription, annotation and alignment systems. In translation, datasets are becoming substantially richer in metadata, which allow for increasingly refined multi-factorial analysis. At the crossroads between the two fields, intermodal investigations bring to the fore what these mediation modes have in common and how they differ. The volume is thus aimed in particular at Interpreting and Translation scholars looking for new descriptive insights and methodological approaches in the investigation of mediated discourse, but it may be also of interest for (corpus) linguists analysing parliamentary discourse in general.

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This paper combines a theoretical and an empirical approach to the analysis of converging linguistic features in speeches held by Members of the European Parliament and interpretations in the same Parliament. The theoretical approach seeks to determine which group has more seniority and therefore more expertise in the linguistic genre of the Parliament. The empirical analysis concentrates on key 3- and 4-grams used in speeches and interpretations to determine which group’s usage is more expert and can be considered the dominant group shaping the linguistic features of the genre. The two-pronged approach reveals that interpreters are the expert group and that for the items considered the case can be made that Members adopt interpreters’ lexical patterns. The study thus provides complementary evidence for Pöchhacker’s (2005) idea that in an interpreter-mediated encounter all interactants influence each other’s communicative behaviour.

In this chapter, we present a corpus study of the French rendition of English concatenated nouns, such as climate change, comparing two modes of interlingual mediation at the European Parliament, namely simultaneous interpreting and written translation. Using parallel corpus data extracted from the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus, we examine how frequently English concatenated nouns are rendered with semantically equivalent items in the two mediation modes, and which factors stimulate the use of these equivalent (vs non-equivalent) renditions. Alongside the complexity and lexicalization of English concatenated nouns, we consider several frequency-related variables inspired by Halverson’s (2017) cognitive linguistic model of translation, the gravitational pull hypothesis. The model posits three cognitive sources of translation effects: gravitational pull (source salience), connectivity (cross-linguistic link strength) and magnetism (target salience). The results show that there are far fewer semantically equivalent renditions in interpreting than in translation. In addition, the regression analysis provides strong evidence that connectivity and magnetism play a crucial role in the selection of semantically equivalent vs non-equivalent renditions in interpretations and translations, alongside the length of source concatenated nouns, with stronger effects in interpreting. By contrast, source-language variables related to gravitational pull and lexicalization do not seem to influence renditions in French. The study brings to the fore key commonalities between translation and interpreting and shows that the three cognitive sources in Halverson’s gravitational pull model can be successfully disentangled in a multifactorial research design.

This paper investigates the rendition of numbers in simultaneously interpreted and translated texts, under the assumption that their processing differs in the two language mediation modes. Exploiting the affordances of EPTIC (European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus), a multialigned, multidirectional, intermodal parallel corpus, we examine accuracy of rendition of numbers in simultaneous interpretations with respect to several source speech parameters: type of number, amount of numerical expressions in the source sentence, delivery rate, language direction, mode of delivery and nativeness of the speaker. Interpreters’ renditions are then compared with those found in translations of the same source texts, to assess similarities and differences in coping with the same source text triggers in the two mediation modes. Conclusions are drawn about the implications of the findings for the education of language professionals.