Reflecting on interpreting practice: graduation theses based on the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC)

Simultaneous interpreting requires a lot of practice to develop adequate linguistic and cognitive automatisms (implicit linguistic competence) and language-transfer ad-hoc strategies (metalinguistic competence). To help students adopt a critical approach and develop their own interpreting competence, our curriculum includes Interpreting Theory which exposes them to the most insightful publications on conference interpreting. However, time-consuming and fast-paced training in the booths risks impairing students’ ability to reflect on the interpreting process and improve their performance accordingly. In this respect, preparing a graduation thesis may become the best opportunity to reflect on interpreting issues, especially on the difficulties met during training. Against this backdrop, EPIC is proving a very useful and challenging resource because it provides students with transcripts of original speeches and their simultaneously interpreted versions. Besides the already transcribed material, students are encouraged to transcribe and analyse new material for their graduation theses following the same conventions. The new videorecorded material is drawn from our EPIC Multimedia Archive. This exercise is doubly beneficial for students: on the one hand, they save time to find authentic professional interpreters’ performances and, on the other hand, they contribute to a major rewarding collective effort because their transcripts will expand the corpus and enable future students and researcher to work on it. During the presentation the results of the graduation theses hitherto discussed at the SSLMIT will be described. The following features were investigated: a) grammatical (Prefissi e simultanea: uno studio empirico, I nomi propri: una sfida per l’interprete); b) interactional (Fenomeni di mitigazione nel discorso interpretato, Politeness in the European Parliament: Beginning Speeches in English and Italian,, Interpretazione simultanea: la resa degli aspetti interpersonali in interpretazione); c) interpreting strategies (La direzionalità nell’interpretazione simultanea: strategie comparate, Interpretazione simultanea al Parlamento Europeo: il fenomeno delle aggiunte).