Genitive variation and unique items hypothesis in simultaneous interpreting from Italian into English. An intermodal study based on EPIC

After experiencing an early phase of vivid interest in the 1980s and the 1990s, the search for "universals" of translation and interpreting, i.e. general features of translated and interpreted language, seems to have slipped into a phase of stagnation in the past few years. On the one hand, it seems questionable to speak of "universal" features of translation and interpreting, since both activities are inseparable from their direction and context. On the other hand, the search for "universals" can be regarded as an attempt to universalize historically and culturally determined practices. The present study focuses on Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit's "unique items hypothesis", according to which translators tend to underrepresent target-language specific items, i.e. items that lack a straightforward (lexical or grammatical) counterpart in the source language, and to replace them with alternative items, which are not incorrect, but less idiomatic and more adherent to the structure of the source language. The present study extends the hypothesis to interpreting and sets out to test it on a possible "unique item" of the language pair Italian-English, namely the 's-genitive. To this end, the 's-genitives are extracted from four sub-corpora of the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus - EPIC (interpretations from Italian into English, original English speeches, official translations from Italian into English and official transcriptions of original English speeches). The present study compares the frequency of the 's-genitives across the four sub-corpora from a monolingual intermodal perspective, to check whether interpreted and translated English actually underrepresents 's (while overrepresenting "of", which is closer to the Italian preposition "di") and whether there are differences between interpreting and translation.