Simultaneous interpretation of political speeches: tackling vagueness and framing the context.

The interpreting profession was born “within” politics. Recently, the advent of community interpreting has reshaped the market of language mediation. Yet, interpreting keeps living within politics: debates, press conferences, summits, roundtables and interviews continue to require the interpreting service as the only way to enable swift interlingual communication between participants. Moreover, interpreting students are extensively trained to tackle political speeches, and university exams often consist in the oral translation of a political text read out by a professor or sent through the students’ headphones. Hence the inextricable link between interpreting and politics. Clearly, the connection forces interpreters to keep pace with the ever-changing political landscape. Against the intrinsic context-framing need and the generally acknowledged difficulty of conveying the pragmatic nuances of persuasive texts (Garzone 2000, Colucci 2011, Viaggio 2002), the paper aims at expounding the pivotal role of source text (ST) analysis in interpreting as a preliminary practice highlighting the predictability of political communication and raising expectations as to the unfolding of the speeches to be translated. A methodological framework hinging on politolinguistics (Reisigl 2010: 244), DHA (Reisigl & Wodak 2009) and pragmatics will be used to analyse two speeches delivered by President Barack Obama, highlight their salient rhetorical features and shed light on their implications, that often compound text comprehension and hinder the attainment of communicative equivalence.