Simultaneous dialogue interpreting: Coordinating interaction in interpreter-mediated football press conferences

Abstract

Press conferences during major football tournaments are usually multilingual and interpreter-mediated. This paper draws on audio and video data from FOOTIE, a corpus of simultaneously interpreted football press conferences in which the interpreters worked either in booths in the conference room or in an adjacent room with a monitor in each booth. The aim of the paper is to show how the interpreters’ dialogue coordination activities emerge in mode-specific ways in simultaneous interpreting, as opposed to consecutive dialogue interpreting in face-to-face settings. In particular, the notion of simultaneous dialogue interpreting is proposed and its implications in terms of dialogue coordination are analysed on the basis of corpus data.