Article,
Sorne considerations on interpreting in an institutional context: the case of the European Parliament
Terminologie et Traduction, (1997)
Abstract
In recent years, research has devoted considerable attention to interpreting in specific settings, such as in courts of law, at broadcast events, and with ethnic communities (Similarly, attempts have been made at establishing typologies of conferences, speeches or speakers, or at least at making explicit the typologies intuitively adopted by practitioners or instructors, as in NAMY (1978). Various distinctive dimensions have been studied. They include some of the individual situations where interpreting takes place, or specific modes of interpretation, ie simultaneous vs consecutiveve (with a focus on memory and note-taking tecnniques) vs otber, non-conference modes. Substantial work has also been done on transfer problems and strategies br interpreting between individual language pairs. The studies carried out so far, however, leave some scope for a further me of research, namely the systematic description of interpreting in different institutional settings. In particular, it may be interesting to analyse the patterns of communication that prevail within a given institution and to investigate how these affect interpreting performance, placing different constraints and expectations on interpreting.
