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Speaking Patterns and Gender in the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus: A Quantitative Study as a Premise for Qualitative Investigations

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Making Way in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies

Part of the book series: New Frontiers in Translation Studies ((NFTS))

Abstract

Speaker’s mode of delivery, input speed, language combination and topic were investigated in relation to target speech (TS) length across 200 speeches contained in the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC). An analysis was carried out of the performances of male and female simultaneous interpreters from English into Italian and Spanish, and between Italian and Spanish. The following statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) between male and female interpreters emerged: for read speeches from English into Spanish the mean delivery speed was faster among females (143 words/min) than males (124 words/min) and TS length was shorter among males (on average –16% of the source speeches) than females (−8%); TSs for the main topics “Politics” and “Procedures and Formalities” were shorter for males than females working from English into Spanish (−18 vs. −4%, and −21 vs. −0.3% respectively). Finally, a significant inverse linear trend was detected between speaker’s delivery speed and the length of TSs, mainly due to females interpreting from English into Spanish and Italian. The gender-based results obtained in this quantitative study lay the foundations for future fine-grained qualitative investigations to assess the semantic impact.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my husband for his assistance with statistics and my colleague Christopher Garwood for his language editing work on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Interpreting and Translation, University of Bologna, Corso della Repubblica 136, 47121, Forlì, Italy

    Mariachiara Russo

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  1. Mariachiara Russo
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Correspondence to Mariachiara Russo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Interpreting and Translation, University of Bologna, Forlì, Italy

    Mariachiara Russo

  2. Department of Economic and Social Studies, Mathematics and Statistics, University of Turin, Torino, Italy

    Claudio Bendazzoli

  3. Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Bart Defrancq

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Russo, M. (2018). Speaking Patterns and Gender in the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus: A Quantitative Study as a Premise for Qualitative Investigations. In: Russo, M., Bendazzoli, C., Defrancq, B. (eds) Making Way in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies . New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6199-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6199-8_7

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