TV simultaneous interpreting of proper nouns from English to Arabic in King Charles III’s speeches

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to explore the interpreting strategies which were employed by TV interpreters to render English proper nouns (PNs) into Arabic. The data of the study comprise PNs detected in King Charles III’s political speeches along with their Arabic renditions produced live by three TV interpreters working for Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabic, and France 24. The study embarks on a qualitative and quantitative approach to achieve its aim. Based on the classification of PNs carried out by Särkkä (2007), PNs found in the English speeches are categorized in terms of their internal syntactic structure into central PNs (CPNs), extended PNs (EPNs), and descriptive PNs (DPNs). The Arabic renditions of PNs are analysed aiming to find a correlation between the category of the proper noun (PN) and the employed strategy. Based on Kalina’s (1992) typology of interpreting strategies, the results indicate that TV interpreters in many cases resorted to emergency strategies, such as omission and compression, to deal with different categories of PNs. The former strategy is particularly evident in dealing with CPNs while the latter appears mostly in DPNs. Aside from emergency strategies, transliteration is frequently used by TV interpreters to render CPNs while the strategy of transliteration plus translation is dominant in rendering EPNs.