ABSTRACT
The demand for Arabic-Spanish simultaneous interpreting (SI) is due to multiple reasons, including the political and economic interdependence and the social and cultural relations between the Arab and the Spanish-speaking world, as well as the growing interest in the contemporary Arab world for strategic and geopolitical reasons. Meetings, symposia, bilateral and multilateral conferences have proliferated since the second half of the twentieth century. In addition, Arabic and Spanish are official languages in international organizations like the United Nations or the African Union, and they are present in the private international market of SI. The introduction of Arabic as a B language in the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the University of Granada in 2002 was a response to this situation. Prior to that there was no possibility of university training in Arabic-Spanish interpreting.
This chapter is based on the study I did for my PhD thesis, defended in March 2015 (Mahyub Rayaa, 2015), and presents the results of an exploratory investigation aimed at obtaining quantitative and qualitative empirical data contributing to a better understanding of Arabic-Spanish SI training and professional market. The data comes from three surveys conducted (45 questions in each) on teachers (7) and students (43) of SI at the University of Granada and on professional Arabic conference interpreters (16) based in Spain. The response rate is 84 percent of all those surveyed in Arabic-Spanish.
The main results indicate (i) a marked impact of asymmetry between Arabic and Spanish covering the linguistic and sociocultural factors; (ii) the lack of a specific didactic approach to address the peculiarities of the Arabic language (standard/dialectal Arabic, accents, cultural concepts and specialized terminology, etc.); and (iii) the absence of methodological strategies to address the asymmetry between Arabic and Spanish in SI training and professional practice. These flaws have a clear impact and raise numerous conflicts that both teachers and interpreters should address. This study identifies and analyses these conflicts.
