The Language of Interpreters on Television: Characteristics, Tendencies And Idiosyncrasies

Television is one of the means of communication which influence society and its development the most, including language, both as reflection and expression of specific socio-cultural settings. Relational aspects and complex participation and organization structures guiding communication on television play a major role in the shaping of a text – i.e. television text – whose features and functions go beyond those of a mere script, as it entails a linguistic activity which is primarily discourse practice (Straniero Sergio 1999). Specific choices and behaviour in terms of discourse and translation attitudes and tendencies – either of television interpreters or those taking up their role (eg. Journalists, hosts, newscasters), together with qualitative evaluation of the interpreting performances outline a use of language specific to the television environment. This generates specific users’ expectations and more or less prescriptive norms regarding translation in particular and the profession of television interpreter in general. Expectations and norms may vary in relation to interaction types and discourse models involved in a given broadcast. On the basis of these assumptions, the aim of the present paper is studying specific aspects of television interpreters’ language regardless of the topic at hand – which is generally closer to the concept of special language. Peculiar aspects are identified through the analysis of comparable corpora made up of homogeneous items – i.e. interpreting performances from various source languages into Italian, sharing interaction types and discourse models, delivered in similar contexts/settings. Such corpora (sub-corpora) are selections of items contained in CorIT (Television Interpreting Corpus) (cf. Straniero Sergio / Falbo 2012). Following the research lines set by corpus-based translation studies, the objective of the present analysis is designing a corpus interrogation which would enable the analyst to identify – if any – an existing language of interpretation (Baker 1993, 1995, 1996, 2004).