ABSTRACT
Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy hold a joint press conference after meeting to review the Schengen treaty (26th April 2011); Luis Urzua, the last of the Chilean miners trapped in the San José mine, is about to come out of the mine and deliver a few words to the world (14th October 2010); Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández await the FIFA World Player of the Year award in a global broadcast (10th January 2011); Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, is ‘remote-interviewed’ by Julian Assange as part of an interview series on international affairs broadcast worldwide on the internet (May 2012); for a BBC World Service documentary a radio broadcaster shares a few days in the lives of small farmers and indigenous people in Paraguay affected by the production of biofuels (April 2010); Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman give an exclusive interview for the DVD extras of their Long Way Around series, which will be released as a multilingual DVD (2004); Canal Sur Televisión Andalucía covers the Granada Film Festival Cines del Sur for a one-hour special on the films presented at the festival, with interviews with the filmmakers, actors and other film-related professionals (every June, 2007-2011) … All these examples of broadcasts share one aspect: language transfer from the language of the
speaker must take place in order to broadcast it in the official language of the broadcasting institution1 and to be understood by its audience; therefore, they qualify as interpreter-mediated broadcasts. However, the examples I have put forward above all differ in three essential aspects which are covered in this chapter: (1) how the interpreter is recruited and where they – or the interpreting team, or even the journalists themselves – carry out their job, (2) how the interpreter-mediated interaction is organized, prior to and during the event, and (3) how the interpreter-mediated event is ultimately broadcast. In an increasingly globalized world, coverage of international news and events, as well as a
wide range of forms of talk (press conferences, news interviews, multi-party debates, advice shows, audience participation programmes, etc.), have gained prominence as an alternative to the traditional narrative of news and/or opinion presentation (Heritage and Clayman 2010: 215). Furthermore, technological development has contributed a wide range of new interpreting output possibilities (see Table 18.1). The growth of interpreter-mediated mass media events and products over the last 40 years has run parallel to the aforementioned factors.
