A descriptive study of the ideological component in the didactics of simultaneous interpreting: political argumentative discourse

Abstract

This article discusses the results of a descriptive study of the mechanisms used by interpreting trainees to transmit ideology in the simultaneous interpreting of an argumentative discourse. For this, a textual corpus was created, consisting of a political discourse in French and the corresponding target texts in Spanish created by Conference Interpreting students (2012-2013) of the former degree course in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Granada. First, theories of Critical Discourse Analysis, especially the proposals of Fairclough and van Dijk, were used to analyse the ideological content of the discourse. Next, the Functionalist model of translation analysis was applied to the study of the mechanisms used by the interpreting trainees to transfer the ideology of the original discourse. Results of the analysis point to a lack of functional adequacy between the original discourse and the target texts, which is reflected at various levels of language, especially in the personal pronouns, neologisms and grandiloquent phrasing.