AN ABSTRACT

Ingrida Tatolytė
Department of Translation and Interpretation Studies
Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, Lithuania

Roles and Goals in Speeches Given by Lithuanian and British MEPs: Lost in Interpreting (?) 

The paper discusses the role and place of an interpreter in some particular communicative situations and the difficulties an interpreter has to overcome when interpreting simultaneously the speeches of such complex genre as 1 minute speeches on matters of political importance given in plenary sessions of the European Parliament. 

For the research 1 minute speeches given by British and Lithuanian MEPs have been chosen. The rhetorical analysis of 1 minute speeches genre is applied, taking into account such requirements of genre as strict timing, and such settings as the distribution of the rhetorical roles a speaker is undertaking, and the goals he/she is pursuing in a speech, as well as the reflection of this complexity in the layer of lexical and syntactic choice of expression. The analysis is made in the context of the communicative situation the speeches are given in, considering such factors as the problem of how the addressee is defined and the conditions of interpreting. 

The aim of the paper is to provide an evaluation of the complexity of a source text and the specific communicational situation in which it is being uttered, and to compare it with a target text in respect of rhetorical accuracy, correctness, and the communicational importance of the latter.