A model of conference interpretation

incl. ref.

The objective of this research is to develop a model of consecutive interpretation that can cope with a number of linguistic, pragmatic, stylistic, thematic, discourse and communicative problems a conference interpreter encounters while interpreting from English into Arabic or vice versa. A linguistic corpus of one hundred page English speeches delivered at the United Nation General Assembly sessions and interpreted into Arabic is analysed. The proposed model caters for both the SL and TL communicative contexts and views the conference interpreter as a mediator who decodes the original message and encodes it appropriately. The model is tested against the collected sample of linguistic data. It has proved to be capable of identifying inconsistencies and inaccuracies in five major areas: textual, stylistic, lexical, collocation and structural; the percentage of each is statistically calculated.