Translation Phenomena at The Tour de France: Sports Commentaries or Consecutive/Simultaneous Interpreting?

Abstract

The Tour de France is one of most important sports events in the world, and it has always had a significant impact on TV audiences in Spain. Every year, the Spanish public TV channel, RTVE (Radio Televisión Española), broadcasts this cycling competition. Its commentators are sports journalist Carlos de Andrés and former cyclist Pedro Delgado. In the post-stage interviews, de Andrés transposes the questions made to the cyclists, as well as their answers, into Spanish, often by using a sort of consecutive interpreting mode and, sometimes, even a simultaneous one.

In this article, the main elements conforming this kind of interpretative act will be analysed from a qualitative and functional perspective. To that end, a corpus consisting of interpretative acts by de Andrés will be used. The data will reveal that, in these consecutive, simultaneous or hybrid interpretative acts, the information given is never translated in full; the result is often an extended or selective summary of what has been said, and is accompanied by sports commentaries.