Ambiguity Resolution in LSP English-Italian Simultaneous Interpreting

For interpreters, ambiguity presents a potential obstacle to comprehension, as they have to simultaneously translate within stringent time constraints and find a prompt and correct solution to resolve lexical or syntactic ambiguities by applying different strategies, i.e. omission, reformulation, increase of décalage and self-correction, already investigated by other researchers (Kalina 1992; Gile 1995; Riccardi 1996, 1998, 2003, 2006). So far, ambiguity in Simultaneous Interpretation has not been widely investigated, especially in Medical English. Ambiguity is a variable that can hinder both students and professional interpreters during simultaneous interpreting (Morelli 2009), especially in medical conferences. For the purpose of the present study, we decided to focus on the ambiguity of Premodified Noun Phrases (PNP), whose high frequency (Gotti, 1991), and complexity can pose a challenge to interpreters (Pignataro, 2010). The aim of this paper is to investigate the strategies adopted during simultaneous interpreting in order to cope with ambiguous segments containing PNPs, in the language combination English Italian. The typology of texts pertains to the LSP sub-genre and the directionality is English-Italian, where English is the B language and Italian the A language (Gile, 2005). Results are compared with the findings obtained from a previous investigation on ambiguity resolution carried out for Italian-Spanish language pair (Morelli 2005, 2009). The study involves 6 participants: 2 professional simultaneous interpreters, 2 new graduate students (with no working experience) and 2 LM1 students (i.e. students at the beginning of Second Cycle Degree). The analysis of results is based on recordings and transcriptions (Heritage & Hatkinson, 1984) of the interpreted texts, with the intention of analyzing the strategies adopted by the interpreters during the experiment and not the mistakes (Morelli 2005, 2009). The ultimate goal is to apply the results of this empirical study to interpreting teaching methodologies.