On the challenges of recoding English into Italian during the simultaneous interpretation of political speeches

Interpreting is a recoding activity hinging on constant reformulation and enabling a foreign text to ‘function’ in another language and culture. Operating lexico-syntactic upheavals is a cognitively demanding process and the need to sustain the activity over an extended period of time entails cognitive strains providing fertile ground for mistakes. The error analysis (ea) of the Italian interpreted versions of the 2008 Victory and 2009 Inauguration speeches by Barack Obama suggests an aetiological classification of mistakes pointing out their cognitive, linguistic or knowledge-related origin. The paper focuses on language-related mistakes to highlight the main hindrances of interpreting from English into Italian. The findings suggest that the English-Italian language combination poses significant and specific challenges, whose failed management tarnishes the interpreted text (it) with evident traces of the English source text (st), thereby jeopardising speech comprehension by the target audience.