Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FAITH (Fluency as faithfulness: A cognitive approach to an interpreting mega-corpus)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-08-31
Professional interpreters provide the highest quality and most instantaneous type of multilingual communication in international organisations, political confrontations, courtrooms and communities. Across interpreting in spoken and signed languages, those who make use of interpreters evoke the notion of 'fluency-as-fidelity' when they engage with and evaluate interpreters: a fluent interpretation is often regarded as faithful. This notion is also applied to language learners, politicians and witnesses. This implies that fluency taps into a universal cognitive-evaluative mechanism that provides information about the speaker in communicative contexts. In recent years, small corpora of interpreting have been explored in interpreting studies as a novel way of investigating fluency, and emerging research has shown the usage-based approach to languages as a promising theory to consider the social and cognitive underpinnings of fluency simultaneously. However, current corpora fail to faithfully represent the multimodal context of interpreting and corpus-based interpreting studies (CIS) remain disconnected from end users. What often goes unnoticed is the intersectional embedding of such a notion and the process of explicating meanings in creating fluency.
The project 'Fluency As faITHfulness: A cognitive approach to an interpreting mega-corpus' (FAITH) investigates the role of fluency in the production and perception of faithfulness. It will do so by combining our team's interpreting expertise with a unified mega-corpus and a perception experiment, using advanced statistics and highly sensitive instruments. The goal will be to explain how interpreters create (un)faithfulness using cognitive abilities such as categorisation, chunking and construal. FAITH will contribute the first unified, multimodal, and open-access interpreting corpus and will implement for the first time multimodality and intersectionality in CIS. It will provide answers to long-standing questions concerning the nature of the faithfulness norm, the explicitation 'universal' and language forms in interpreting. Cumulatively, FAITH will further the EU priority of ''Promoting European interests and values on the global stage'' by enabling intercultural understanding between policymakers and diverse groups of people. FAITH has three research objectives (ROs):
1. unify interpreting corpora on a compatible platform (Work Package [WP]1),
2. compare the production and perception of fluency in political interpreting (WP2A and WP2B),
3. empirically demonstrate the cognitive basis of explicitations in interpreting (WP3).
The project will deliver four publications, a data repository for interpreting corpora and associated code, two datasets, a special issue and an edited volume.
The project 'Fluency As faITHfulness: A cognitive approach to an interpreting mega-corpus' (FAITH) investigates the role of fluency in the production and perception of faithfulness. It will do so by combining our team's interpreting expertise with a unified mega-corpus and a perception experiment, using advanced statistics and highly sensitive instruments. The goal will be to explain how interpreters create (un)faithfulness using cognitive abilities such as categorisation, chunking and construal. FAITH will contribute the first unified, multimodal, and open-access interpreting corpus and will implement for the first time multimodality and intersectionality in CIS. It will provide answers to long-standing questions concerning the nature of the faithfulness norm, the explicitation 'universal' and language forms in interpreting. Cumulatively, FAITH will further the EU priority of ''Promoting European interests and values on the global stage'' by enabling intercultural understanding between policymakers and diverse groups of people. FAITH has three research objectives (ROs):
1. unify interpreting corpora on a compatible platform (Work Package [WP]1),
2. compare the production and perception of fluency in political interpreting (WP2A and WP2B),
3. empirically demonstrate the cognitive basis of explicitations in interpreting (WP3).
The project will deliver four publications, a data repository for interpreting corpora and associated code, two datasets, a special issue and an edited volume.
Technically, the project delivered the Unified Interpreting Corpus platform (UNIC; https://unic.dipintra.it/(opens in new window)) the first open-access and open-source data infrastructure in translation and interpreting studies. Since its launch in October 2024, more than 40 users have registered on UNIC. It currently hosts the data of three corpora, offering about one million words and 113 hours of recordings in Chinese, English, Italian and Spanish for search, viewing and download. As of August 2025, the data have been consulted more than 1,000 times.
Scientifically, the project delivered a journal article published, two conference papers, two datasets, an article manuscript under review, and a speical issue and edited volume under preparation. An international workshop was organised. The journal article was published in Interpreting, the top venue in the field of interpreting studies. Two conference papers were published in the proceedings of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) annual conferences.
Scientifically, the project delivered a journal article published, two conference papers, two datasets, an article manuscript under review, and a speical issue and edited volume under preparation. An international workshop was organised. The journal article was published in Interpreting, the top venue in the field of interpreting studies. Two conference papers were published in the proceedings of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) annual conferences.
The results of WP1 can advance corpus-based studies of interpreting, accessibility of translation and interpreting data, and infrastructural efforts in cognate fields. This is because it established a standardised format for describing interpreting data and a unified portal for sharing them, and made all code openly accessible. To ensure further uptake, more demonstrations of the platform in regions other than Europe and access to funding to upgrade the platform would be the key.