The quest for quality assessment criteria in media interpreting

Media Interpreting (MI) is a “professional-lay discourse addressing an undifferen- tiated mass audience with a mass entertainment logic” (Straniero Sergio 2003: 167). Media Interpreters possess communicative skills and a peculiar “mind set” (Mack 2002): they are expected to “sound as slick and confident as any television presenter”, even when working under pressure (Kurz 2001, 2002). The goal of the present study is to outline quality criteria (Gile 1983, 1995; Pöchhacker 2001) through the analysis of interpreter-mediated events. Our assumption is that quality norms in MI are based more on the form rather than on the content, due to the pragmatic context (Setton 2006) where entertainment function prevails over the information function (Katan & Straniero Sergio 2001). As a consequence, media interpreters are “evaluated not for interpreting a speech correctly but convincingly well” (Sergio Straniero 2003:172), and they are expected to elicit the same response from the “overhearing audience or mass viewers” (Katan & Straniero Sergio 2001:214) that the interviewer wants to obtain. An analysis will be carried out in order to detect some of the most important features pertaining to Rhetoric in simultaneous interpreting (Setton 2002, 2005, 2006): actio and elocutio (Reboul 1996). The investigation will be on how the art of using language to communicate effectively and persuasively affects the interpreter’s performance. The study will be conducted on a corpus-based analysis of interviews pertaining to the “infotainment” genre, in the language combination English-Italian, interpreted in simultaneous mode by a professional conference interpreter, working for Italian television. Both source and target texts will be recorded, transcribed and analyzed using discourse analysis (Heritage & Atkinson 1984), with the aim of identifying the most significant rhetoric indicators, for quality assessment with a target- oriented perspective. Thanks to this analysis, some quality criteria will be proposed and a new ethics of MI will be outlined (Straniero Sergio 2003).