Politische Persuasion im europäischen Parlament: Deutsch-Italienisch im Vergleich

Abstract

What strategies do politicians use to convey their ideas and convince the audience of what they say? How are these devices received by interpreters and, above all, how are they interpreted? In my article, I will use some speeches delivered by German-speaking members of the European Parliament to examine how the language of politics and the persuasion strategies of politicians are expressed and how simultaneous interpreting can reproduce these strategies. In the latter, due to temporal and other constraints, not all elements of the original oral text can be reproduced, such as wordplay, word formation and rhetorical figures at the lexical level and information structure at the syntactic level. If the oral speeches are then reproduced in written form, as is usual at the European Parliament, certain content and language strategies can be recovered, but only in this later phase, which definitely loses some features of the spoken language. The question to be investigated in this article is: is it possible to reproduce, in a convincing manner, the message of a source text even if elements of persuasion strategies are missing? Pragmatic, textual and linguistic-system considerations will illustrate the theoretical framework with the aid of concrete examples