Interpretazione dialogica e (s)cortesia. Una prospettiva didattica

This article provides a qualitative overview of the challenges posed by language (im)politeness in a dialogue interpreting class. The examples are extracted from a corpus of dialogue interpreting simulations in the Italian-Spanish language pair where Spanish is the foreign language for most of the students. Interpreting involves carrying out several mental activities simultaneously in a situation of communicative urgency. As a result, professionals will have to learn to allocate the mental effort where it is most needed. On the basis of the data, I will try to exemplify how, due to either an imbalance in the distribution of cognitive resources, or mental fatigue, or inadequate translation decisions, or poor language mastery, inexperienced subjects tend to concentrate on the propositional content of utterances while neglecting the sociopragmatics of the interaction. In particular, as regards linguistic (im)politeness, incorrect use of the pronouns of address or the omission of mitigation sometimes produce potentially impolite renditions or, conversely, deliberately impolite source utterances are rendered as polite, censoring the original speaker's intention. Therefore, in some cases, while the interpreted utterances are semantically equivalent to their respective original utterances, they are socio-pragmatically inequivalent. In other cases, they are both semantically and pragmatically inaccurate