To Kill or Not to Kill: Metaphors in Simultaneous Interpreting

Students of conference interpreting are often taught that the best way to deal with metaphors is to use a paraphrase rather than to maintain the figurative expression. Metaphors are normally culture bound and rarely have an equivalent in the target language. Moreover, interpreters in simultaneous interpreting only have a few seconds to find a solution and provide a translation, which is not usually enough to decode the metaphor in one language and encode it an another. But do professional interpreters adopt this approach when they work? Is this the best method to translate metaphors in simultaneous interpreting? This study tries to answer these questions by ’analysing the performance of professional interpreters in a real working context. We used for this purpose the interpreting corpus of the European Parliament (EPIC), that is a three language corpus – English, Spanish and Italian - which contains the transcriptions and recordings of the speeches made in the plenary sessions of the European Parliament in 2004 and their interpretations in the three languages.