Category shifts in simultaneous interpreting in one of Trudeau's speeches

Abstract

The present study tackles category shifts in simultaneous interpreting in one of the Canadian Prime Minster, Justin Trudeau's, speeches. Translation shifts, especially category shifts, are very common in simultaneous interpreting from English into Arabic. The four types of category shifts, i.e., structure shifts, unit shifts, class shifts and intra-system shifts, are investigated and analyzed in this study. The interpreting is done from English which is Trudeau’s native language into Arabic. After analyzing Trudeau's speech both in his native language, English, and the target language, Arabic, the study comes up with some interesting results. For example, structure shift is shown to be the most common and widely used one; whereas intra-system shift is the least common one. However, this does not mean that the latter rarely occurs. All of the four shifts regularly occur in simultaneous interpreting but in different degrees. No one can say that those shifts undermine or belittle the interpreting process. On the contrary, they suggest that the interpreter is well qualified in both languages that he can smoothy shift between structures, units, classes and intra-systems of both source and target languages without affecting the quality of the interpreting.