Speaking patterns and gender in the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus. A quantitative study as a premise for qualitative investigations

Speaker’s mode of delivery, input speed, language combination and topic were investigated in relation to target speech (TS) length across 200 speeches contained in the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC). An analysis was carried out of the performances of male and female simultaneous interpreters from English into Italian and Spanish, and between Italian and Spanish. The following statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) between male and female interpreters emerged: for read speeches from English into Spanish the mean delivery speed was faster among females (143 words/min) than males (124 words/min) and TS length was shorter among males (on average -16% of the source speeches) than females (-8%); TSs for the main topics “Politics” and “Procedures and Formalities” were shorter for males than females working from English into Spanish (-18% vs -4%, and -21% vs -0.3% respectively). Finally, a significant inverse linear trend was detected between speaker’s delivery speed and the length of TSs, mainly due to females interpreting from English into Spanish and Italian. The gender-based results obtained in this quantitative study lay the foundations for future fine-grained qualitative investigations to assess the semantic impact.