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APRIL/MAY The Linguist 7
GLOBAL PLATFORM
The current President of the European
Parliament, David Sassoli, addresses MEPs
Do interpreters render impoliteness? A study of political
speech reveals the answer, says Magdalena Bartłomiejczyk
I
n Jonas Jonasson's The Hundred-Year-Old
Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and
Disappeared, the Swedish protagonist,
Allan Karlsson, ends up in Moscow having
dinner with Stalin. As well as the dictator, his
two cronies and Allan, at the table sits "a
little, almost invisible young man without a
name and without anything either to eat or to
drink": the interpreter. During the dinner, the
amicable mood suddenly collapses as Allan
quotes an inappropriate, imperialist poet,
and Stalin flies into a fury. A long tirade
results, which ends as follows:
'I've been thinking,' said Allan.
'What,' said Stalin angrily.
'Why don't you shave off that moustache?'
With that the dinner was over, because the
interpreter fainted.
Why should the interpreter have fainted?
After all, this insolent suggestion was not his
own – he was 'only' supposed to transfer it to
Stalin from the real author. Surely he had no
reason to feel responsible for the offensive
content? Or had he? This episode illustrates
the main question I tried to answer in my
study of interpreting in the European
Parliament: what can the interpreter do when
they are required to voice a statement that is
likely to offend the recipient and is, in fact,
intended to do just that?
In order to obtain instances of impoliteness,
I set out to investigate more than four years
of plenary speeches by three members of the
British political party UKIP: Nigel Farage, John
Bufton and Godfrey Bloom. This amounted
to five hours and 13 minutes of material in
English, plus the interpretations into Polish.
The material proved unparliamentary
enough, featuring 293 'impoliteness events' –
on average one every 64 seconds.
A typical impoliteness event contains
several face-threatening acts with a specific
target: the audience at the European
Parliament (possibly excluding the speaker's
supporters), a high European Union (EU)
official, an institution such as the European
Commission, or even a whole country. For
instance, when Herman Van Rompuy was
elected as the first ever permanent President
of the European Council in 2009, Farage
Aiming for rudeness
©
EUROPEAN
UNION
2019
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SOURCE:
EP;
DAINA
LE
LARDIC
