Interpreting the Oscar Night on Italian TV: an interpreters’ nightmare?

Simultaneous interpreting is recognised to be an extremely complex cognitive activity placing high demands on linguistic abilities, extra-linguistic knowledge and communication skills of those who perform it. Specific difficulties identified in literature as the main factors contributing to the complexity of the interpreters’ task include high information density, especially if combined with a high speed of talk and/or not well structured utterances, proper names, figures, culture-bound references, humorous, ironical or highly emotional passages, unfamiliar accents and pre-prepared speeches read out with no chance for the interpreter to have access to them. Simultaneous interpreting for live media ceremonies entails even more difficulties due to the peculiar features, structure and time constraints of the broadcast event. This study discusses simultaneous interpreting of two Academy Award Ceremonies – in 2000 and 2010 – focusing on two specific difficulties: proper names and culture-bound references. These two editions of the Oscar Night boradcast live in the US and in Italy with interperters were videorecorded and fully transcribed (both the original and the interpreted versions). The interpreters’ performance is analysed using rendition categories based on the work by Wadensjö (1998). Results are discussed in the light of previous studies and Relevance Theory.