ИСТИНА

Conference interpreting remains an indispensable part of the global institutional framework. One of the contexts in which it takes place is political press conferences, whose format determines practical organization of the events and the assignment of the interpreter. The generalization of simultaneous interpreting and globalization of mediaspace marked the beginning of new trends towards expanding live coverage of news conferences that require the so-called media (television) interpreting effected with a displacement of interpreters from the physical core of the meeting. As a result, simultaneous interpreting for political press conferences is frequently performed in two main scenarios: in situ by the official interpreters of delegations, and in absentia if commissioned by audiovisual media (TV or Internet channels). Hence, one might hypothesize that though interpreting in both scenarios is fulfilled by professional conference interpreters, the degree of setting formality, interpreter status and target audience could affect interpreting strategies and rendition. The research database comprises video recordings of 18 press conferences following bilateral talks, which involve English-Russian language pair, and 36 audio tracks of interpretations carried out in both scenarios. The linguistic features of original speeches and of two versions of renditions for each item were thoroughly analyzed and compared in order to retrieve similarities/differences in interpreting strategies employed. The findings suggest that analyzed interpretations diverge in terms of translation equivalence, since the official interpreter is working under certain pressure to convey the form of original utterances accurately and precisely (formal equivalence), whereas TV interpreter seems to have more freedom, which makes his rendition sometimes sound more natural and idiomatic (dynamic equivalence).