Fine-tuning SI Quality Criteria: Could Speech Act Theory be of any Use?

This chapter looks at political rhetoric in the European Parliament, focusing on speech acts and the way they are conveyed by interpreters. Discourse in the European Parliament is a specific genre with speech acts constituting an integral rhetorical element of the genre. Following an analysis of an authentic corpus comprising more than 100 speeches in four languages, delivered in the European Parliament, the theoretical framework of the present chapter focuses on speech act theory, and the way it can be used to complement translation and interpreting theories in a close analysis of SI performances. The aim of the analysis has been to use authentic data in order to obtain some specific information that could be applied to interpreter training, as well as suggesting an approach for interpreter quality assessment