How native-like do conference interpreters sound in L2?

Abstract We present an exploratory observational study on A-B interpreting in the European Parliament. In contrast to popular belief, it is a widespread practice for some of the newer EU languages to be interpreted into English by native speakers of the source language. The phonetic-acoustic properties of speech in English by eight Polish retour interpreters are assessed on the basis of material extracted from a large bidirectional EP-Poland corpus. We use the methodology from L2 speech research, based on identifying segmental and suprasegmental departures from native norms. The speech samples were inspected aurally and visually by means of spectrogram and waveform. The general detected departures emerge mostly from the differences between Polish and English sound systems. Although some of the interpreters may have more native-like accent than others, all the analysed interpretations are phonetically proficient and fully intelligible. In three of the interpreters, interesting regularities concerning pronunciation fluctuations were discovered.