Looking for Lexical Patterns in a Trilingual Corpus of Source and Interpreted Speeches: Extended Analysis of EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting Corpus)

The research described in the present article is an extensive study of the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC), a collection of 9 sub-corpora containing transcripts of source speeches and corresponding interpreted versions in three languages (English, Italian and Spanish). The authors investigated lexical patterns in speeches originally delivered in Spanish and speeches interpreted into Spanish (from English and Italian), by focusing on lexical density (expressed as the ratio of lexical words over the total number of running words in each sub-corpus) and lexical variety (expressed as the percentage of each sub-corpus accounted for by the 100 most frequent words). This methodology was used by Laviosa to study lexical patterns in English written (original and translated) texts. The results obtained from our Spanish sub-corpora are compared with Laviosa’s results and with the results of a previous study of ours conducted on the English and Italian materials of EPIC. Thus, EPIC is analysed as both a comparable and a parallel corpus. The complex lexical patterns emerging from the present study provide insights into the role played by mode of translation (written translation vs. simultaneous interpreting), language combination and language direction.