Dibattiti presidenziali USA 2012: gli elementi culturali nelle interpretazioni simultanee in italiano e in spagnolo
This paper analyses the issue of Culture-Bound Elements (CBE) and their rendition in simultaneous interpretation. It focuses on the 2012 US Presidential Debates between the democratic President Barack Obama and the republican candidate Mitt Romney. The analysed interpretations were provided by four television channels which aired the debates live: RaiNews24 and SkyTG24 in Italy, Canal24Horas in Spain and the Spanish-speaking broadcasting company Univisión in the USA. All the video material was transcribed and added to CorIT, the Television Interpreting Corpus of the University of Trieste. The paper begins with a discussion of the features of media interpreting compared to conference interpreting. The second part discusses the importance of culture in shaping and understanding a message, culture- bound elements, their nature and the strategies that interpreters can adopt to deal with them. The third part presents the debates, the interpreting teams and the transcription process carried out. The fourth section offers the analysis of some examples of how the interpreters dealt with the CBEs in the case study. Finally, the last section contains statistical data on the strategies used by the four teams and the conclusions reached on their overall success in dealing with CBEs.