La metafora in interpretazione simultanea dal tedesco all'italiano: il caso degli interpreti in formazione

Metaphors have always been an object of study. In the past many have shown interest towards this topic, at the beginning poets, philosophers, literature critics and later on also linguists and psychologists. However, it was at the end of the seventies, thanks to Howard Pollios study, that metaphors became an object of study for psychologists and linguists. As a student at the interpreting masters degree in Forlì, it was immediately clear that metaphors represented a major difficulty in interpreting. University lecturers have always tried to teach students to “kill the metaphor”. This shows that all metaphors are different from one another, yet there is one thing that all metaphors share, that is, the obstacle that they represent for simultaneous interpreting. The first chapter of this dissertation is divided in two parts. The first one we will highlight the metaphors theory and will describe what approaches have been employed when dealing with this topic. The second part describes what simultaneous interpreting is. The second chapter deals with the political language and with the use of metaphors in this sector. The third and fourth chapter describe the experiment carried out to see how trainee conference interpreters deal with metaphors. Furthermore, chapter four will illustrate, what parameters have been chosen for the analysis of the interpreters’ outputs and it contains a categorisation of all metaphors found in the source text. Chapter five will be divided in two parts, the first one, summarizes the interpreters’ outputs and evaluates their quality with reference to the selected quality criteria. The second one, focuses on the outputs of the metaphors found in the source text and analyzes what translation techniques have been adopted. Having two different groups of interpreters, belonging to two different academic years, it will be interesting to analyze if, as far as the quality of the interpreters’ outputs is concerned, substantial differences exist.