La prosòdia en interpretació simultània anglès-català: comparació entre discursos amb implicacions emocionals diferents

Abstract

Communication encompasses every single aspect of a speech, including non-verbal features. Interpreters, however, must manage one single available channel while working: voice. On the other hand, voice studies and literature on voice from a conceptual approach are rather scant. Taking this into account, the aim of this paper is to boost prosody research by analysing the intonation flow, and the amount and duration of pauses and silences in two original English speeches and their six respective interpretations from six different volunteers grouped in three different categories based on their experience in the field. In choosing the speeches, it was imperative that one of them be very emotional, and the other one not so much, thus connecting to greater or lesser extent with personal experience. Nowadays, emotional speeches are studied as one of the most effective ways for transmitting knowledge. Since empathy is one of the interpreter’s main competences, our purpose is to prove elicited emotional empathy, stating that the prosody used in the final speeches is richer in the most emotionally implicated discourse than the other one despite the interpreter’s proficiency. Admittedly, the small number of samples does not allow us to establish any kind of prosodic rule. Nevertheless, we would like to contribute to the advancement of prosody research by observing the tendencies adopted and getting the gist of the obtained results in a résumé, in which our hypothesis is proved.