Pleonasms in Polish-English interpreting

Abstract

Our decision to have this article included in the present volume follows from the fact that the problem of a linguistic expression containing redundant components, a pleonasm, had received little attention in interpreting studies before 2007. It was at that time that we decided to investigate the problem of pleonastic constructions in Polish / English simultaneous and consecutive interpreting. More specifically, we attempted to explore to what extent the effect of redundancy at the input phase affected the output in the Target Language (TL). The factors involved were many, among them, as we hope to have demonstrated, the experience of the interpreter and the interpreting mode. Our analysis has shown that interpreters in the early stages of training tend to rely on Source Language (SL) syntactic patterns and transfer pleonastic structures to the TL text. By contrast, more advanced interpreters tend to focus on the propositional meaning, which results in a lower level of text redundancy.