The impact of Spanish regional varieties on the simultaneous interpreting into Czech

In many ways, the society in which we live is more globalized and linguistically diverse than ever before. Necessarily, this poses a challenge for interpreters because, in practical terms, it means that Spanish to Czech interpreters are likely to be often in contact with native Spanish speakers not only from Europe but also from Central and South America. Therefore, they should have a profound knowledge of different regional varieties of Spanish. To determinate whether students of Spanish to Czech interpreting are acquainted with these varieties, the author of this article conducted an experiment at the Institute of Translation Studies, Charles University. As part of the experiment, five Master students of conference interpreting were asked to interpret simultaneously a speech pronounced by four different speakers (the speakers were from Argentina, Peru, Mexico and from the North of Spain) and to complete a questionnaire. Overall, the interpreters made fewer omissions, additions, semantic errors and delivery errors while interpreting the part pronounced by the Spanish speaker. Moreover, throughout the speech the interpreters who are in frequent contact (TV, radio) with Latin American varieties of Spanish made fewer omissions, additions, semantic errors and delivery errors than the interpreters who are not in regular contact with these varieties. This suggests that better knowledge of different regional varieties of Spanish may have a positive impact on the quality of simultaneous interpreting.

Keywords: varieties of Spanish; simultaneous interpreting; interpreting errors; experiment