Uncovering the Strategies Used in English to Persian Simultaneous Interpreting: The Case of USA President’s Speech

This paper focuses on a corpus that considers the strategies employed during English-to-Persian (E-P) simultaneous interpreting (SI). A 17-minute interpreting corpus was compiled, consisting of: a) original English statements delivered by the president of US on the framework to presumably prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and b) their simultaneous Persian interpretation. The transcription of original speech was adopted from White House website, and simultaneous interpretation video was adopted from IRINN website. Then, a content analysis was done in order to investigate the use of interpreting strategies. The classification of strategies was based on the Kalina s categorization which is one of the most comprehensive classificationsof SI strategies. The results showed that various strategies were used in E-P simultaneous interpreting. The recognized strategies can be attributed to two categories: “general” strategies, and “specific” strategies. It was also indicated that, most of the strategies attempted to impel toward target text production, since time limitation, and political and security reasons had great influence on the quality and accuracy of interpretation. The overall results of the study were discussed and the implications were made.