La diffusione dell'inglese come lingua franca (ELF): possibili ripercussioni sull'interpretazione simultanea

The rise of English as a global language and its subsequent use as a means of intercultural communication have stressed the importance acquired by the English language in recent decades. The use of English as a default language in most communicative situations brought forth an increasingly diversified linguistic scenario, with new varieties of English stemming from it. Due to the ever-changing nature of the English language, the said varieties are difficult to define and categorize. The aim of this dissertation is to cast some light on the subject of ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), focusing on how it originated and spread, outlining its main features, and paying particular attention to the fields of translation and interpreting. In order to describe ELF and verify whether it could be a hindrance to interpreters, an analysis was carried out on 10 short non-native speeches held at the European Parliament. The said analysis is focused both on vowel and consonant changes and on non-standard morphosyntactic constructions. In a second step, the analysis aimed at detecting how the above-mentioned features could have influenced in a negative way the Italian interpreter's delivery. Because of the limited amount of texts in the analyzed corpus and the restricted range of parameters considered, the results of this analysis are not presumed to be applicable to all fields, contexts and communication situations. Despite these limitations, what can be inferred from such results is that this kind of constantly evolving language can indeed interfere with and affect the interpreting process.