Analysing departures in E/A simultaneous interpretation: A case study of ex-president Mubarak speeches (Jan-Feb 2011)

Abstract

Simultaneous interpretation (SI) is a complicated process that involves a variety of cognitive operations, posing a multitude of problems. As a result, deviations from the source, or “departures”, are inevitable. Departures committed by interpreters represent an interesting area of study. Henri Barik (1975) has studied departures in SI and arrived at a categorization of omissions, additions, and substitutions. This paper uses contrastive analysis to examine the departures in the interpretation of the three final speeches by Ex-president Hosni Mubarak to test the strength of Barik’s model. For a more solid framework, the analysis draws from other models to expand Barik’s model covering further categories and giving grounds and explanations to the departures detected. The results confirm Barik’s categories, expand them through Daniel Gile’s Effort Model and Mona Baker’s discussion of equivalence and non-equivalence, conclude a set of linguistic and cognitive causes for such departures, and assess their effect on the output.