Out of the blue... and back. Preparing for an interpretation assignment at CESTHA, a marine wildlife conservation and recovery centre

The aim of this thesis is to acquire knowledge and to prepare terminological resources for an interpretation assignment at CESTHA (experimental centre for the protection of habitats) of Marina di Ravenna (RA). The assignment is about interpreting simultaneously into English and Spanish the guided visits to the Centre with the bidule system. In order to do this, the first chapter explores the notion of "science communication" and, more generally, the concept of "dissemination", which is undoubtedly an essential part of CESTHA’s mission of safeguarding the environment and marine animals. The subject of specialised languages is also discussed. In the second chapter, the scope and the domain of this research are established. CESTHA’s mission and the main activities carried out at the Centre are described, and an audio excerpt of a guided tour is analysed to identify the characteristics of the language used by researchers and visitors. The anatomy, the life cycle and the main threats to the survival of Caretta caretta sea turtles are also investigated. Finally, the bidule system, the tool that will be used during the interpretation, is presented, focusing on its advantages and disadvantages. In the third chapter, the methodology used to create the glossary and the derived terminology entries is outlined. It is about creating comparable corpora in Italian, English and Spanish with the BootCat programme and then extracting useful terms from them with the AntConc software. Finally, the fourth chapter presents the completed glossary and derived termbase, containing 270 terms. The structure and purpose of these documents is also described. As far as the glossary is concerned, a discussion is put forward on how it can be best leveraged to prepare for interpreting assignments in a booth, by importing it into dedicated Computer-Assisted Interpretation (CAI) tools.