Interpreting for the Mass Media

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.