TV Simultaneous Interpreting of Collocations: The Context of Political Speeches

This paper investigates the interpreting strategies employed by television interpreters when rendering English collocations into Arabic during simultaneous interpretation. The focus is placed on the Arabic interpretations of King Charles III’s political speeches as broadcast by Sky News TV. While some research has addressed the interpretation of collocations, few studies have specifically examined this linguistic feature in the context of English-Arabic simultaneous television interpreting. Moreover, existing research tends to rely on experimental tasks assigned to interpreters rather than analyzing authentic, real-time broadcasts. This study fills a significant gap by examining actual interpreted material drawn from media discourse. Benson’s typology of collocations is adopted to identify and categorize the collocational items in the source texts, while the strategies for dealing with untranslatable collocations are analyzed according to the framework developed by Shakir and Farghal. The results demonstrate that in 58% of the observed instances, interpreters did not provide direct Arabic equivalents for the English collocations. Instead, they applied alternative strategies to render the intended meaning. These strategies include deletion, synonymy, calquing, compensation, generalization, and message abandonment. The paper also explores the contextual and cognitive factors that might influence interpreters’ strategy choices, such as time pressure, lexical availability, and the level of formality in the source text. The study offers new insights into the challenges faced in live TV interpretation and highlights the importance of training interpreters to handle collocational challenges effectively.