Towards a definition of Interpretese: An intermodal, corpus-based study

Abstract

Apart from its contribution to the analysis of translated discourse as such, corpus-based translation studies has often involved the comparison of translated corpora and comparable originals, in an attempt to isolate the features that typify translations, whether globally or in a more restricted set. The study reported here applied a similar methodology to the analysis of interpreted discourse, comparing it not to non-interpreted (spontaneous, original) spoken discourse but to its written (translated) counterpart. A computerized analysis of the interpreted outputs of six professional translator-interpreters rendering the same text from their second to their first language in both modalities revealed a set of marked differences between them in terms of richness (type-token ratio), and of a range of lexico-grammatical features. Despite its drawbacks in terms of ecological validity, the methodology used in this study is seen as a tool for extrapolating a set of stylistic and pragmatic features of interpreted – as opposed to translated – outputs, and may constitute an extension of the range of the paradigms available to corpus-based translation studies. A statistical analysis of the morphological data generated pointed to salient differences between the two corpora, and it is these differences that are at the core of the present study. The methodological implications and possible extensions are also discussed below.