DCEP - Digital Corpus of the European Parliament

The paper presents a new highly multilingual sentence-aligned parallel corpus consisting of various document types and covering a wide range of subject domains. With a total of 1.37 billion words in 23 languages (253 language pairs), gathered in the course of ten years, this is the largest single release of documents by a European Union institution. Corpus statistics, required preprocessing, sentence alignment, and possible gains in statistical machine translation when adding this corpus to the previously existing ones are also considered.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Face threats in interpreting : a pragmatic study of plenary debates in the European Parliament

This monograph focuses on pragmatic aspects of simultaneous interpreting, and is therefore intended both for translation scholars and for linguists interested in interlingual transfer of pragmatic meaning. Efforts have been made to avoid dense, strictly scientific language and the use of unexplained specialist terminology in the hope that the book might also appeal to practicing interpreters and interpreter trainees, although it should be noted that its character is descriptive rather than prescriptive. The main problem under discussion is how simultaneous interpreters handle face-threatening acts and impoliteness directed by politicians at their opponents, and the authentic material under analysis comes from plenary debates of the European Parliament, which are routinely interpreted into all the official languages of the European Union. Chapters 1–4 are meant to set the scene. Chapter 1 presents the European Union as a multilingual institution, with a special focus on its translation and interpreting services. Chapter 2 zooms in on the latter, considering such features of plenary debates of the European Parliament that have direct consequences for interpreting, and also including an overview of existing research on interpreting for the needs of various EU bodies. Chapter 3 provides the pragmatic background to the study, shedding light especially on the crucial notions of “face,” “facework,” “face-threatening acts” and “impoliteness,” while Chapter 4 reviews existing research on facework performed by interpreters in various settings and interpreting modes. The author’s empirical contribution is presented in Chapter 5, which scrutinises Polish interpretations of British Eurosceptics’ plenary speeches, in particular ones that fiercely attack and possibly offend the speakers’ political opponents. Five speeches undergo detailed discourse analysis covering all identifiable aspects of facework as performed by the original speaker and the interpreter, whereas a considerably larger corpus of source texts and the corresponding interpretations is analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of personal reference and impoliteness. The interpretations are searched, first and foremost, for signs of interpreting strategies at play during transfer of face-threatening input. Many of these strategies result in mitigation of the originally intended impoliteness. Chapter 6 develops this topic, endeavouring to find multifarious explanations of the pronounced trend towards mitigation by the interpreter within the wide framework of modern translation studies. Both this chapter and the final conclusions devote much attention to avenues for future research that would offer some possibilities of triangulating and complementing the results of the present study

Interpreting

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount cultural identity. The default mode of interpreting shows a desire for speed that suppresses differences requiring cultural mediation. It is theorized this imbalance stems from the invention and implementation of simultaneous interpreting within a highly charged historical moment that was steeped in trauma. Interpreting as a professional practice developed in keeping with technological capacities and historical contingencies accompanying processes of industrialization and modernity. The resulting expectations about what interpreting can and cannot achieve play out in microsocial group dynamics (as inequality) and macrosocial policy (legalized injustice). Interpreting invites an encounter with difference: foreignization is embedded within the experience of participating in simultaneous interpretation because interpreting disrupts the accustomed flow of consciousness, forcing participants to adapt (or resist adapting) to an alternate rhythm of turn-taking. This results in an unusual awareness of time. Discomforts associated with heightened time-consciousness open possibilities for deep learning and new kinds of relationships among people, ideas, and problem-setting. An analysis of the frustrations of users (interpretees) and practitioners (interpreters) suggests the need for other remedies than complete domestication. Reframing training for interpreters, and cultivating skillful and strategic participation by interpretees, could be leveraged systematically to improve social equality and reduce intercultural tensions through a balanced emphasis on sharing understanding and creating mutually-relevant meanings. This comparative cultural and critical discourse analysis enables an action research/action learning hypothesis aimed at intercultural social resilience: social control of diversity can be calibrated and contained through rituals of participation in special practices of simultaneously-interpreted communication

Electronic petitioning and modernization of petitioning systems in Europe

With the pilot project "Public Petitions", which started in September 2005, the German Bundestag included the internet in the petition procedure and thus achieved greater transparency of the petition process. Since then, petitions can be submitted electronically, signed on the internet and discussed. The Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag (TAB) has accompanied this process scientifically and asked about the yields and consequences of the pilot project. Were more petitions submitted? Who participated in the electronic petitions? How were the petitions discussed in the online forums and how were the results of the discussions introduced into the political process of deliberation on petitions? This study provides answers to these and other questions for the first time on the basis of a comprehensive empirical study. The analyses of the pilot project of the German Bundestag are placed in the context of the development of petitioning and e-democracy as a whole. Case studies on the introduction of electronic petition systems in the Scottish Parliament, the British Prime Minister, South Korea, Australia (Queensland) and Norway complete the picture. This book is based on TAB report Nr. 146 "Elektronisches Petitionswesen und Modernisierung des Petitionswesens in Europa. Endbericht zum TA-Projekt"

Intertextuality and ideology in interpreter-mediated communication : the case of the European Parliament

This doctoral thesis explores simultaneous interpreting (SI) as a social practice by investigating EU institutional hegemony and interpreter axiology in the institutional setting of the European Parliament (EP). Theoretical research is complemented by a corpus study of the interplay between these two forces in SI-mediated EP plenary debates. A multilayered understanding of discourse as a set of practices is developed before exploring the relationship between ideology and axiology manifest in discourse manifest in text. Bakhtin's term dialogised heteroglossia is used in this context to refer to the centripetal forces and centrifugal forces of language. The Gramscian theory of hegemony as shifting alliances is applied to EU institutional hegemony, before the concept of axiology is introduced to address subjective interpreter ethics and evaluation. Corpus analysis concentrates on intertextuality (manifest and latent intertextuality), lexical repetition of key institutional terms; and metaphor strings characteristic of EU institutional hegemony. Results suggest that EU institutional hegemony is strengthened by SI, and that interpreter mediation in the form of interpreter axiology occurs and is constrained by institutional hegemony. This `socially orientated' approach therefore contradicts the conduit view of communication. In this study, the simultaneous interpreter is shown to be an additional subjective actor in heteroglot communication

PANEL ONE: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN REFUGEE PROTECTION

LUNG-CHU CHEN, MODERATOR, PROFESSOR OF LAW, NEW YORK LAW SCHOOL ARNOLD H. LIEBOWITZ, COUNSEL FOR THE HEBREW IMIGRATION AID SOCIETY DAN KESSELBRENNER, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL IMMIGRATION PROJECT OF THE NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD MARYELLEN FULLERTON, PROFESSOR OF LAW, BROOKLYN LAW SCHOOL HIROSHI MOTOMURA, PROFESSOR OF LAW, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO SCHOOL OF LA