Studying figurative language in simultaneous interpreting: the IMITES corpus

The translation of figurative language has always been a major issue and, often, a problem in the translation process. But what happens when a choice on how to translate a figurative item needs to be made in a fraction of a second? The natural difficulties in the translation process of figurative expressions become even more complicated when applied to the simultaneous interpreting process. Samaniego Fernández (2011: 263) claims that “the proper task of translation theory would not be to specify how metaphor should be translated, but to describe and account for actual renderings of metaphors”. Believing that the same claim can be made as regards Interpreting Studies, the IMITES (Interpretación de la Metáfora entre ITaliano y ESpañol) project was devised to study how professional interpreters actually deal with metaphors. The IMITES data set includes a total of 23 original speeches (287 minutes) delivered in Italian and Spanish at conferences held at the European Commission, and their interpreted versions in Spanish and Italian respectively (287 minutes). 1135 figurative expressions were extracted from IMITES and aligned and compared with the interpreters’ renditions. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results yielded by the analysis of IMITES, with the twofold goal of a) analysing the interpreting strategies applied by professionals, such as those working for the Directorate General for Interpretation (SCIC) of the European Commission, when interpreting figurative expressions; and b) understanding which kind of figurative expressions cause most problems for interpreters.