Live broadcast simultaneous interpreting for TV is a relatively rare, but extremely challenging form of audiovisual translation. It gives a large target language audience an insight into the most crucial events happening in other countries and cultures, and, at the same time, it gives numerous viewers, most of whom never participate in international conferences, a unique chance to experience simultaneous interpreting.
Live broadcast simultaneous interpreting has not been widely researched so far. The most prominent researchers publishing on the topic are, beyond doubt, Franz Pöchhacker and Ingrid Kurz, who have discussed various aspects such as mode-specific constraints, quality expectations or physiological stress. They have also published a few case studies on the English-German language pair.
In my paper, I would like to discuss two interpretations of President Obama’s inaugural address broadcast by two Polish news channels. Inaugural speeches by American presidents are crucial political statements, explicitly directed at the American people but also at an international audience. They are carefully crafted and often contain phrases which go down in history and are quoted over and over again in years to come. However, they are clearly not presented bearing in mind the constraints of simultaneous interpreting. President Obama’s speech poses numerous problems for interpreters, such as high speed of delivery and numerous cultural references.
My analysis will focus on the strategies employed by the Polish interpreters to deal with this difficult source text. The overall strategy in both cases is compression but it is applied differently by different interpreters. I will also describe some presentation features which may influence the reception by viewers and try to assess the interpretations in terms of them reaching their communicative goal.