Text Processing Patterns in Simultaneous Interpreting (Spanish-Italian): a Corpus-based Study

The question might arise as to why interpreting between two cognate languages seems to be so challenging, when most of the morphosyntactic or lexical pitfalls are supposedly easily understood and solved much quicker than when interpreting between languages of different origins. The objective of the present paper is to study the effect of SL morphosyntactic asymmetries and ambiguities on professional interpreters‘ output and to look for distinctive text processing patterns during simultaneous interpreting from Spanish into Italian within the framework of a corpus-based approach. First, a brief overview of the studies on interpreting from Spanish into Italian will be provided as theoretical background to the present study. We shall then present the corpus of Spanish source speeches contained in EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus) which we explored by means of corpus linguistic tools to select SL asymmetries and ambiguities. Finally, we shall analyse the corresponding TL renditions.