Mediated discourse at the European Parliament: Empirical investigations

Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny (ed), Adriano Ferraresi (ed), Ilmari Ivaska (ed), Silvia Bernardini (ed)

Synopsis


The purpose of this book is to showcase a diverse set of directions in empirical research on mediated discourse, reflecting on the state-of-the-art and the increasing intersection between Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (CBIS) and Corpus-based Translation Studies (CBTS). Undeniably, data from the European Parliament (EP) offer a great opportunity for such research. Not only does the institution provide a sizeable sample of oral debates held at the EP together with their simultaneous interpretations into all languages of the European Union. It also makes available written verbatim reports of the original speeches, which used to be translated. From a methodological perspective, EP materials thus guarantee a great degree of homogeneity, which is particularly valuable in corpus studies, where data comparability is frequently a challenge.


In this volume, progress is visible in both CBIS and CBTS. In interpreting, it manifests itself notably in the availability of comprehensive transcription, annotation and alignment systems. In translation, datasets are becoming substantially richer in metadata, which allow for increasingly refined multi-factorial analysis. At the crossroads between the two fields, intermodal investigations bring to the fore what these mediation modes have in common and how they differ. The volume is thus aimed in particular at Interpreting and Translation scholars looking for new descriptive insights and methodological approaches in the investigation of mediated discourse, but it may be also of interest for (corpus) linguists analysing parliamentary discourse in general.

 

Chapters

  • Using European Parliament data in translation and interpreting research
    An introduction
    Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny, Adriano Ferraresi, Ilmari Ivaska, Silvia Bernardini
  • Ut interpres
    Linguistic convergence between orators and interpreters in the European Parliament
    Bart Defrancq, Koen Plevoets
  • Formality in mediated and non-mediated discourse
    Bringing together human judgements and corpus-driven detection
    Ilmari Ivaska, Adriano Ferraresi, Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny
  • Fluency parameters in the Polish Interpreting Corpus (PINC)
    Agnieszka Chmiel, Danijel Korzinek, Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny, Przemysław Janikowski, Dariusz Jakubowski, Dominika Polakowska
  • Migration in EP plenary sessions
    Discursive strategies for the Other construction and political Self representation in Italian to Spanish interpreter-mediated texts
    Ilaria Anghelli, Laura Mori
  • Using the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis to explain patterns in interpreting and translation
    The case of concatenated nouns in mediated European Parliament discourse
    Marie-Aude Lefer, Gert De Sutter
  • Cohesion through the lens of EPTIC-SI
    Sentence-initial connectors in interpreted, translated and non-mediated Slovene
    Tamara Mikolič Južnič, Agnes Pisanski Peterlin
  • Exploring linguistic variation in mediated discourse: translation vs. interpreting
    Heike Przybyl, Alina Karakanta, Katrin Menzel, Elke Teich
  • NLP-enhanced shift analysis of named entities in an English<>Spanish intermodal corpus of European petitions
    Gloria Corpas Pastor, Fernando Sánchez Rodas

Statistics

Biographies

Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny

Marta Kajzer-Wietrzny is an assistant professor in the Department of Translation Studies at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Following her PhD dissertation on Interpreting universals and interpreting style (2012) she continues with empirical investigations of interpreted, translated and non-native language use e.g. within the TRINFO project carried out in part during a research stay at the University of Bologna in 2018-2019. She participated in two corpus-compilation initiatives making use of the European Parliament data: EPTIC (European Translation and Interpreting Corpus) and PINC (Polish Interpreting Corpus). At times she attempts to combine corpus methods with process research such as key-logging and eye-tracking, in particular while looking into the traits and the process of inter- and intralingual translation.

Adriano Ferraresi

Adriano Ferraresi is associate professor of English language and translation at the University of Bologna, and a member of the Board of the Doctorate in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies of the same University. His main research interests are in the field of construction of linguistic resources, and has been involved in several collaborative corpus construction projects, including the WaCky and Eurolect Observatory initiatives, and, since 2016, the EPTIC project. On the more descriptive side, his work focuses on corpus-based investigations of phraseology and terminology in native, translated and lingua franca varieties of English, looking for commonalities and distinctive traits of these forms of mediated language production.

Ilmari Ivaska

Ilmari Ivaska is assistant professor of Finnish at the School of Languages and Translation Studies of the University of Turku, Finland. His research focuses on data-driven corpus methodologies and their applications in studying typical tendencies in texts written by L2 language users and, more recently, translated texts written by L1 language users, when compared to non-translated texts written by L1 language users. The investigation of new ways to study linguistic divergence between different modes of language use lie at the core of Ivaska’s research interests. He finds it fascinating that the factors to-be-taken-into-account can range from genres to the communication task at hand, and from the nativeness of the language users to constraining factors of multilingual communication – and the myriad relationships between these factors.

Silvia Bernardini

Silvia Bernardini is professor of English linguistics and translation at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, Italy, where she teaches translation from English into Italian and corpus linguistics. She has published widely on corpus use in translator education and for translation practice and research. Her research interests include the investigation of the points of contact between translation and interpreting and translation and non-native writing, seen as instances of bilingual language use. Together with colleagues at the Universities of Bologna, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Louvain, Poznań and Turku, she has been involved in the construction of the intermodal and multilingual EPTIC corpus.

book cover

Published

September 29, 2022
LaTeX source on GitHub
Cite as
Kajzer-Wietrzny, Marta, Ferraresi, Adriano, Ivaska, Ilmari & Bernardini, Silvia (eds.). 2022. Mediated discourse at the European Parliament: Empirical investigations. (Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing 19). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6976930

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-393-5

doi

10.5281/zenodo.6976930

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-051-8

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180mm x 245mm