Interpreters’ explicitating styles

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates explicitation as an indicator of individual interpreters’ style in the outputs of professional interpreters working for the European Parliament. The material used for the study is a sub-corpus of target texts by 12 interpreters extracted from a larger bi-directional parallel corpus of plenary contributions with the aid of voice recognition software. Interpretations from English into Polish and vice versa have been annotated manually for various explicitating shifts, ranging from cohesion-related additions and specifications to more extensive pragmatically oriented amplifications. Our initial hypothesis holds that interpreters working for the Polish Language Unit, who regularly cooperate and as a result acquire similar linguistic habits, are expected to display limited variety in their explicitating styles. The results do not confirm this assumption. The interpreters in our sample differ substantially in their explicitating styles, especially regarding frequency and consistency. This finding precludes any convergence due to their status as members of the same community of practice.