Discursos jurídicos en interpretación simultánea. Un reto concreto: los falsos amigos

The cultural, linguistic and technical skills that simultaneous interpreters develop throughout their professional careers allow them to tackle all types of conferences with varying degrees of success depending on their experience. S/he will always have to struggle to achieve the arduous task of establishing correspondences between linguistic signifiers even when the correspondence between meanings is often partial, if not totally absent. This task becomes even more arduous if one considers that in order to solve her/his doubts or find the most appropriate expression, the booth interpreter, unlike the translator, does not have much time to consult with experts or to look up in dictionaries, manuals and everything that has been generated by jurisprudence and legal culture. Within this framework, the interpretation of legal speeches poses more challenges due to the very nature of this type of language, and the variety of text typologies, communicative situations and presentation methods. After a brief review of the features of legal language from the Spanish-Italian contrastive perspective, this paper focuses on a problem specific to this type of language in simultaneous interpretation: phonic suggestions and false friends, real traps for any interpreter, but especially for those who work with similar languages. At the end, a collection of these problematic terms found in various legal texts and opportunely classified will be proposed.