Phraseological patterns in interpreting and translation: similar or different?

Research in corpus-based studies of translation and interpreting has typically focused on monolingual comparable and/or interlingual parallel perspectives; only more recently intermodal comparisons have been proposed as a new paradigm, aiming to shed light on the traits that distinguish one form of language mediation from the other. Pursuing this line of research, the present contribution draws on EPTIC, a newly created intermodal corpus, to compare phraseological patterns in Italian texts translated and interpreted from English. We investigate whether translations and interpretations differ in terms of use of different types of word pairs (infrequent, highly frequent and strongly associated sequences), and further check whether differences, if any, also apply to oral vs. written non-mediated texts, and/or to mediated vs. non-mediated texts. Results indicate that translations are more phraseologically conventional than interpretations in terms of the majority of the parameters considered, and that these two forms of mediated output are more dissimilar to each other than they are to comparable non-mediated texts. We hypothesize that the observed differences are related to cognitive and task-related constraints characterizing the translation and interpreting processes.