European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC): Methodological issues and preliminary results on lexical patterns in SI

The European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC) is one of the first machine-readable corpora available in the field of Interpreting Studies. It was created in 2004/2006 by the Directionality Research Group, based at the University of Bologna at Forlì (Italy), and consists of 9 sub-corpora in total: three sub-corpora of source language speeches (Italian, English and Spanish) and six sub-corpora of simultaneously interpreted speeches, thus comprising all possible directions and combinations of the three languages involved. The present paper focuses on two main areas of Corpus-based Interpreting Studies: methodology and applied research. The first part addresses some of the main methodological issues that arise when creating a machine-readable corpus of simultaneous interpreting (SI) material, particularly in data collection and corpus design. The second part presents the main results of one of the studies carried out on EPIC material so far, namely a study of lexical patterns that draws on Laviosa’s study on lexical density and lexical variety in source and target texts of English narrative prose (Laviosa 1998b). The same methodology is applied to all EPIC material, analysed from both a comparable and a parallel perspective. The results thus obtained shed light on the role played by translation mode (written translation vs. simultaneous interpreting), language combination and language direction.