Interpretare una lezione universitaria: le sfide del discorso accademico italiano e dell'educational interpreting

This work focuses on educational interpreting, i.e., an interpreting service rendered within an educational setting, and analyses the renditions of two different university lectures produced by two professional interpreters during simultaneous interpreting. The data discussed here was collected in the framework of Educational Interpreting and Multilingualism, a pilot project carried out by the Department of Interpreting and Translation of Bologna University at Forlì campus, which led to the first experience of simultaneous interpreting of university lectures in Italy. Two lectures of History of Eastern Europe delivered in Italian and interpreted into English were recorded, transcribed, and analysed with a special focus on some specific features of academic discourse and namely: digressions, domain-specific terminology, mitigation expressions, glosses, and phatic statements. Wadensjö’s classification of renditions (1998) as complemented by Amato and Mack (2011) was used to discuss some excerpts of the interpreters’ renditions. The main findings of the qualitative analysis of renditions, although based on a small set of data, unveiled two main trends: 1) no serious loss of information is caused by omissions; 2) interpreters tend to omit mitigation expressions and statements with a phatic function. Since phatic expressions have an interactional function and mitigations are used to save one’s face, it would be beneficial to raise awareness among educational interpreters on the importance of these elements.