The translation challenges of premodified noun phrases in simultaneous interpreting from English into Italian: A corpus-based study on EPIC

This paper examines the handling of complex noun phrases in simultaneous interpretation into Italian of English speeches in the electronic corpus EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus). The complex noun phrases analysed in this study are noun phrases with two or more premodifying items included in the following categories: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, cardinal numbers and genitives. The aim is to extract complex noun phrases from a large sample of authentic English speeches and compare them with their corresponding translation into Italian in order to study the strategies used by interpreters. The initial hypothesis was that complex noun phrases pose a translation challenge in simultaneous interpreting from English into Italian because of structural and lexical diversities and memory overload. This hypothesis was partially confirmed in that strings where information was changed or deleted represent 45 per cent of the cases. In most cases, however, interpreters were able to adopt effective translation strategies.