Introduction

Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, 2022, after a reign of 70 years. Subsequent to her death, King Charles III delivered three significant speeches as the new sovereign. The first was a televised address to the nation on September 9, where he paid tribute to his late mother. The second speech took place on September 10 before members of the Accession Council, formally proclaiming him as king. Lastly, on September 12, he addressed both houses of the UK parliament.

Since these speeches hold great significance, numerous television channels worldwide broadcast them live, offering simultaneous interpretation in various languages. Among these channels are Arabic-speaking networks like Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabic, and France 24. In crucial speeches, as exemplified in the chosen corpus, speakers may announce significant decisions, such as the appointment or dismissal of officials. These decisions often involve numerous PNs, including individuals’ names, job positions, institutional organizations, and geographic locations. While TV interpreters may be acquainted with well-known names, handling less familiar ones could present a processing challenge. Furthermore, extensive lists of names can overload interpreters’ short-term memory, thereby consuming their processing capacity (Al-Jabri, 2017).

Translating/interpreting PNs from one culture to another poses a demanding task, with challenges intensifying as the cultural gaps widen. Managing PNs in the realm of TV simultaneous interpreting (TV SI) introduces additional complexity due to the cognitive load of interpreting, the stress factor, the extremely brief time available for rendition, the absence of pre-scripted texts, and the scarcity of comprehensive interpreting training programs, particularly in the Arab World (Al-Jabri, 2017).

TV SI, sometimes referred to as broadcast interpreting or media interpreting, is a recent modality of language mediation in the sphere of television (Darwish, 2006: 56). It is a form of interpreting which is frequently performed in rooms or studios other than those where the event is in fact occurring. Therefore, TV interpreters are physically isolated from the speakers making their task even more difficult (Lee, 2011: 148).

Highly skilled TV interpreters specializing in the Arabic-English pair appear to be scarce, especially given the lack of a comprehensive interpretating training program in the Arab World (Darwish, 2006; Al-Jabri, 2017). According to Gamal (2019), the marginalization of interpreting at universities and translation conferences in the Arab World contributes to a deficiency in both the theory and practice of conference interpreting. This shortage, in turn, impacts the performance of interpreters operating in various fields.

The paper sheds light on a seriously under researched area in English-Arabic interpreting studies. PNs between English and Arabic have rarely been investigated within the context of simultaneous interpreting (SI) let alone in the context of TV SI. The present study, therefore, attempts to fill in a gap in this area by dealing with authentic interpreting data. It particularly aims to:

  1. 1.

    Identify and classify the types of PNs used in King Charles III’s speeches at the internal syntactic structure.

  2. 2.

    Identify the interpreting strategies which were adopted by TV interpreters to render English PNs into Arabic.

  3. 3.

    Establish a correlation between the internal syntactic structure of the category of the PN and the strategy employed to interpret it.

TV SI: an overview

Pöchhacker (2004: 9–10) defines interpreting as “a form of translation in which a first and final rendition in another language is produced on the basis of a one-time presentation of an utterance in a source language”. This, therefore, entails the fundamental distinction between the roles of translators and interpreters. A translator typically has the flexibility to review and refine their translation multiple times before presenting it to the end user. In contrast, an interpreter has just one singular opportunity to deliver their immediate translation.

Two major modes of interpreting are often used: consecutive interpreting (i.e., the mode in which the interpreter listens to a whole meaningful sentence, or more, while taking notes, and then, with the speaker pausing, renders the message from the SL into the TL) and SI (i.e., the interpreter renders the speaker’s message from the SL into the TL, as he/she listens to the latter’s words) (Jones, 1998).

TV interpreting, also known as broadcast interpreting or media interpreting, represents a recent form of language mediation within the television domain. However, this modality had already developed in Europe and other regions long before it emerged in the Arab World. In Europe, Darwish (2006: 56) notes that live SI for television gained prominence in the early 1960s, coinciding with the Cold War. The situation in the Arab World presents a contrast, as satellite TV channels were not established until the 1990s. In fact, television itself was introduced in the Arab World with its debut in Egypt in the early 1960s (Alterman, 1998).

SI excels in live events where there is minimal time for preparation, making it especially well-suited for rendering political speeches. In such scenarios, the interpreter is typically situated in a separate studio without a direct view of the speaker(s) (Lee, 2011). The speaker may not be aware that their speech is being interpreted. Meanwhile, the interpreter relies on visual input through a monitor, serving as their primary medium of interaction, introducing distinctive aspects to the task.

To describe and address the cognitive complexity of the SI process, several models were introduced including Gile’s Effort Model (1995: 162–165). It emphasises that SI involves three competing concurrent operations which require the allocation of processing capacity resources. The first is the Listening and Analysis Effort, which includes the operations of receiving the SL message through the interpreter’s ears to the interpreter’s final decisions about the meaning of the message. The second is the Production Effort, which covers the operations of the mental representation of the meaning of the message to be delivered to the actual delivery of that meaning. The third is a short-term Memory Effort, which involves the operations that cover the time interval from the moment of receiving the SL message to the moment of its actual delivery in the TL is completed.

Gile (2001) argues that the cognitive processing capacity of simultaneous interpreters can be directly influenced by factors such as the nature of the assignment, the topic, the pair of languages involved, the speaker’s style and accent, the speed of delivery, the density of speech, and working conditions, among other aspects. High dense discourse can obstruct the Listening and Analysis Effort. Gile (1995: 169) explains that if the speech is dense, the interpreter may be too busy processing and analysing one segment, therefore not having enough capacity left to listen effectively to the incoming segment. When the two languages (for example Arabic and English) involved have different syntactical structures, a greater decoding effort is required which potentially overloads short-term memory (Li, 2010).

Considering the cognitive challenges inherent in SI, the role of the interpreter can be exceptionally demanding and stressful. Simultaneous interpreters must be quick-witted and adaptable to meet the specific demands imposed by each speaker or task. The immediacy of their responsibilities, coupled with a minimal margin for thought, alongside the requirement to provide clear and accurate output, places simultaneous interpreters under significant pressure, leaving them with limited options.

Dealing with PNs as previously mentioned adds complexity to the work of interpreters. To accommodate the unique nature of SI and enhance their performance, interpreters employ a diverse array of strategies, both consciously and subconsciously. The primary strategies will be underscored in the following section.

Strategies of SI

Kalina (1992: 253) defines a strategy as “goal-oriented, so that the goal determines the amount and thoroughness of processing”. Therefore, interpreting strategies are viewed as processes that focus on the achievement of a specific goal, even though they might not be governed by any plan. Kalina (1992: 253) argues that a strategy may be consciously used but may also have become automatic “in so far as the processor will not have to make any cognitive decision”.

Riccardi (2005: 760–762), on the other hand, adopts a more differentiated stance dividing strategies into skill-based and knowledge-based ones. Applying these strategies, according to Riccardi, is triggered by the recognition of well-known stimuli within a communicative event such as phrases of welcoming, greetings, thanks, the introduction of different points of agenda among others.

One of the most comprehensive catalogues of SI strategies was presented by Kalina (1998: 115–121) who classified the strategies, which she views as most useful, into two major categories: Comprehension strategies and Production strategies. Below is a compact review of the two categories of strategies:

  1. A.

    Comprehension strategies are strategies which enhance the understanding of the source text. This category includes preparation strategies which refers to gathering information about the interpreting task in relation to the participants, the topics that will be discussed and the potential terminology to be interpreted; inference refers to deriving conclusions by relying on the context or world knowledge; anticipation means to foresee what the speaker is going to say in the upcoming segment before it is uttered; and chunking is when the interpreter divides the incoming message into meaningful segments to simplify its analysis.

  2. B.

    Production strategies is further divided into source-text strategies, target-text strategies, emergency strategies, repair strategies and global strategies.

  1. 1.

    Source-text (ST) strategies include two strategies: Syntactical transformation which is using a different syntactical construction in the TL to express the meaning of the SL message and transcoding which refers to word-for-word rendition maintaining, however, the naturalness of the TL.

  2. 2.

    Target-text strategies include ear-voice span which is when an interpreter extends the ear-voice span in order to receive more input and better understand a message); text compression or text condensation is when the interpreter omits redundant items to serve the economy of the text; text expansion or addition is when the interpreter adds extra information that was not uttered by the speaker; stylistic strategies is using expressive means to fulfill the communicative goal; and presentation strategies through which the interpreter apply non-verbal ways of expression and super-linguistic features such as, intonation and pause distribution.

  3. 3.

    Emergency strategies are strategies which interpreters resort to when other strategies fail to handle the challenges of a task, including fatigue, background noise, high density of information, and fast speech delivery, among others. These strategies include compression which is selecting which information to present through simplification, generalization or omission.

  4. 4.

    Repair strategies refer to those strategies which the interpreter employs to correct errors which might occur during interpreting. They include either self-correction which refers to the interpreter’s decision to correct an error in his/her rendition or the decision not to correct an error.

  5. 5.

    Global strategies include monitoring which refers to testing the coherence of the incoming text with the already formulated hypotheses.

In this study, language-independent strategies have been mainly drawn from the studies carried out by Kalina (1998) and Kohn and Kalina (1996), while strategies with possible language-specific implications have been drawn from the descriptions of Al-Salman and Al-Khanji (2002). Nine common strategies widely used among English-Arabic interpreters when encountering difficulties were observed by them: 1. Skipping: to leave out unnecessary repetition, redundant expressions or any unimportant information. 2. Anticipating: to expect what will come next and amend the information to put it in the most appropriate way possible in the TT. 3. Summarizing: to minimize long sentences by maintaining the content and yet delivering the message. 4. Approximating: to provide the closest equivalent or synonym to have a similar TT expression. 5. Code-switching: to shift the style from standard to informal or colloquial language that is used when the interpreter is under pressure due to the speaker’s fast delivery. 6. Literal interpreting: to use literal translation. 7. Incomplete sentence strategy: to utter unfinished sentences due to the occurrence of unfinished sentences by the speaker. 8. Addition: to add extra information to either explain or emphasis 9. Message abandoning: to resort to silence when the interpreter cannot interpret the message due to difficulties they are facing.

Proper nouns

Huddleston (1988: 96) maintains that PNs are the names of a specific person, place, organization, etc. For instance, “Elizabeth” refers to a person; “England” refers to a place. In the same vein, PNs, according to Särkkä (2007), are names by which we understand the designation of specific people, places, and institutions. Grammarly, PNs are different from common nouns (CNs) in a way that PNs are definite on their own whereas a common noun needs a definite article to be definite.

One of the most important classifications of PNs is carried out by Särkkä (2007) who classifies English PNs according to their internal structure into three types:

  • The first is central proper nouns (CPNs), which refer to names that cannot be further analysed in terms of internal syntactic structure: e.g., Charles, London.

  • The second type is extended proper nouns (EPNs) which consist of a CPN plus a descriptor denoting the semantic category of the entity concerned: e.g., Westminster Hall, the Republic of Finland.

  • Third, there are converted CNs which are different from the first two in that names of the third group do not contain elements that are CPNs. This group can be called descriptive proper nouns (DPN), such as the Queen Tower.

In SI, given all the peculiarities of the task, Gile (1995: 173) emphasises that names can be potential problems for interpreters, especially if the interpreter is not familiar with a particular name or its pronunciation in the target language (TL). In terms of Gile’s Efforts Model and its focus on listening/analysis, and production and memory, names and other smaller linguistic forms such as numbers or acronyms may heighten the interpreter’s efforts, necessitating specific “coping tactics”.

The current study investigates the interpreting strategies TV interpreters adopted to deal with each category of PNs within the circumstances explained before aiming to establish a correlation between the internal syntactic structure of a PN and the way it is interpreted.

Methodology

The methodology employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate PNs in King Charles III’s speeches and their Arabic renditions by three TV interpreters affiliated with Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabic, and France 24.

Corpus and data preparation

The corpus used for the purpose of the study consists of three English speeches delivered by King Charles III along with their Arabic simultaneous interpretations. The first speech was delivered a day after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, marking King Charles III’s inaugural address to the nation as the new sovereign of the UK. In this speech, King Charles announced his wife, Camilla, as his Queen Consort. Additionally, he revealed the new roles of Prince William and Duchess Kate, designating them as Prince and Princess of Wales, as well as Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and Cambridge.

The second address took place on September 10 before the Accession Council, officially proclaiming King Charles. The third speech occurred on September 12 in Westminster Hall, where the new monarch received formal condolences from the Speakers of the House of Commons and the House of Lords during a session with the UK parliament.

The Arabic interpretations of the English speeches were produced live by three TV interpreters employed by three Arabic-speaking TV channels: Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabic, and France 24. Both the original speeches and their simultaneous interpretations are available to the public on the YouTube website.

The process of transcribing the selected speeches was performed manually on multiple hearings, and the English and Arabic data were transcribed orthographically as heard. The SL transcripts were easily obtained from UK televisions’ websites. The obtained versions were cross-checked with the audio record and the necessary adjustments were made to ensure that the transcript mirrors the source.

The English PNs detected in the source language (SL) and their Arabic counterparts are extracted. Then, extracted English PNs are classified based on Särkkä (2007) in terms of their internal syntactic structure into the three categories explained earlier in Section “Proper Nouns”.

Results and discussion

Categories of PNs at internal syntactic structure

The selected speeches comprise 39 PNs distributed over the three main categories: CPNs, EPNs, and DPNs illustrated in Table 1 below:

Table 1 Categories of PNs based on internal syntactic structure.
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As can be observed from the collected data, CPNs represent the most common category of PNs (41%) in King Charles III’s speeches. Considering the context of the speeches, which were mainly meant to pay tribute to King Charles III’s late mother, vowing to continue her work, and announcing new roles of his heir and wife, this result is rather expected. In his speeches, King Charles mentioned names including his wife, his children, their wives, and names of British institutions in addition to other key PNs. CPNs, according to (Al-Hamly and Farghal, 2015: 5), are considered the archetype of PNs. They involve words that do not carry sense the way CNs do. While CNs can both predicate and refer (e.g., the CN boy in John is a boy vs. The boy has left), CPNs only individualize persons and entities in the outside world by their being PNs (e.g., William and London); hence they are the most common and most familiar (Al-Hamly and Farghal, 2015).

DPNs, as illustrated in Table 1, come second in frequency (30.8%). This category is the output of individualizing entities in the outside world by converting predicates (basically CNs and adjectives) to PNs. For example, the input to the PN the New Palace comprises the adjective New and the CN Palace. Once these DPNs are created, they behave just like CPs in language. However, they remain more akin to sense as they originally derive from predicates rather than PNs (Al-Hamly and Farghal, 2015). To explain, the PN the New Palace retains the sense of the converted predicates while individualizing a certain palace, whereas London and Harry hardly involve sense while individualizing a city and a person respectively.

Finally, EPNs come last in the data (28.2%), slightly behind DPNs. This category, according to (Al-Hamly and Farghal, 2015: 6), involves combining PNs and predicates and, therefore, they are more reflective of sense than CPNs and less so than DPNs. For example, the PN Church of England comprises the predicate church along with the PN England, which makes it more representative of sense than, for example, the CPN Britain and less so of sense than the DPN Second War Two.

Interpreting strategies across CPNs

Table 2 shows that the strategy of transliteration is the most used strategy by TV interpreters when dealing with CPNs. TV Interpreters are normally familiar with most nouns referring to important political figures and other key entities. Therefore, the interpreters had only to transfer them in a phonologically naturalized form into Arabic. For example, England was rendered as إنجلترا and William into وليام.

Table 2 Interpreting strategies across CPNs.
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However, as explained in Section “TV SI: An Overview”, PNs, regardless of their categories, can overload the cognitive capacity of simultaneous interpreters leaving little or no time at all to retrieve their counterparts in the TL, especially when other stress triggers appear, such as speedy delivery, the speaker’s accent, and dense stretches. This probably explains why omission, as an emergency strategy, comes second with just a slight difference from transliteration. It is evident that all TV interpreters were struggling to cope with the speaker who was reading his scripted speeches from the prompter or the paper. Therefore, simple CPNs, such as Britain and Cape Twon were left out by two interpreters on several occasions. Had this task been a translation rather than an interpreting task, where time is not an issue, all these rather simple PNs would have been translated correctly.

The third strategy is transliteration plus addition (8.3%) which involves the addition of a generic term in order to make the transliterated CPN more explicit to the audience. For example, one interpreter rendered Shakespear into الشاعر وليام شكسبير adding the two words شاعر (poet) and his first name وليام (William) which explains to the reader that the referent here is a poet. Similarly, the least frequent strategy Translation + addition involves the addition of a generic term to the translated CPN. For example, one interpreter added the word يوم (day) to the translated CPN Wednesday الأربعاء although this addition is more redundant than useful. It in fact consumes valuable time the interpreter could have used to process other upcoming segments of the speech.

The strategy of translation comes fourth as the TV interpreters rendered CPNs into their standard equivalents in Arabic. For instance, the CPN God was rendered into الله and الرب. Clearly, the former is a more domesticated choice while the latter is foreignized.

Interpreting strategies across DPNs

This category of PNs involves a variety of interpreting strategies more than the previous two. The two top strategies used by TV interpreters are the emergency strategies omission and compression accounting for 38.9 and 16.7% respectively. For instance, the DPNs Silver Jubilee, Golden Jubilee, Diamond Jubilee, and Platinum Jubilee, which were used several times by the speaker, are either omitted altogether or translated as اليوبيل (jubilee) where the adjective is deleted. Compression, in these examples, does not seem effective since the deleted predicates carry the sense important for the target audience to understand which jubilee the speaking was referring to. PNs in this category are long as they consist of more than one word which requires more processing time and more reliable memory. Moreover, this category includes less familiar terms, such as the Crown Estate, the Sovereign Grant, and Queen Consort, hence the emergency strategies (Table 3).

Table 3 Interpreting strategies across DPNs.
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Both the strategies of translation and translation plus transliteration come third, each accounting for 13.9% of the total strategies. DPNs bear meaning in addition to individualizing entities in the outside world; therefore, these strategies seem efficient to render the meaning of the DPN. Examples include Silver Jubilee, which was translated into ذكرى الخمسين لحكم الملكة الراحلة, Second World War الحرب العالمية الثانية, Old Palace القصر القديم. Examples of translation plus transliteration are Golden Jubilee اليوبيل الذهبي, and Scottish titles الألقاب الأسكتلندية.

As for approximation, it appears twice where two TV interpreters rendered Queen Consort as مستشارتي الخاصة (my special consultant). Finally, generalization was employed once by one TV interpreter who rendered New Palace as البنى الجديدة (new buildings).

Interpreting strategies across EPNs

Table 4 indicates that 69.7% of the EPNs are rendered by the strategy of translation plus transliteration. As explained before, EPNs involve a combination of both PNs and predicates; predicates are usually translated while the PNs are often transliterated. Therefore, this strategy seems reasonable and expected. For example, the EPN Elizabeth Tower is rendered as برج إليزابيث where Elizabeth is transliterated into إليزابيث and tower is translated into برج. Similarly, Prince of Wales is rendered into أمير ويلز, and Church of England into كنيسة إنجلترا.

Table 4 Interpreting strategies across EPNs.
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Omission accounts for 12.1% of the EPNs. For instance, the TV interpreters of Al Jazeera and France 24 left out the two EPNs Duke of Cornwall and Dutchy of Cornwall. Both PNs were mentioned in a rather dense stretch where King Charles III was allocating new roles for his wife and his children. Therefore, it is possible that the excessive cognitive work has overwhelmed these interpreters leaving them with little time to process and reproduce these terms in Arabic.

Transliteration and compression come last with 9.1% each. Examples on the former are Duke of Cornwall and Dutchy of Cornwall where one interpreter rendered them as دوق كورنوال and دوقية كورنويل respectively. Both Arabic renditions are phonologically naturalized. Compression, on the other hand, is similar to omission in the sense that it is an emergency strategy. It involves deleting parts of the EPN; usually the deleted part is the CPN. The fact that EPNs consist of predicates plus a CPN makes it probably easy to do so. Queen Elizabeth, for example, is rendered by one interpreter into الملكة (the queen) where the name Elizabeth is omitted. In this example, compression seems effective as it saves time and retains the meaning in the translated term. However, in other examples, it seems confusing to the target audience. The EPN Church of Scotland is rendered by one interpreter into الكنيسة (the church) where Scotland was omitted. This deletion contributes to a loss in meaning to the target audience who would not know which church the speaker was referring to.

Conclusion

The primary aim of this paper was to categorize the PNs identified in King Charles III’s speeches and investigate the diverse interpreting strategies employed by three TV interpreters from Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabic, and France 24 to handle each category. The identified PNs are organized based on their internal syntactic structure into CPNs, EPNs, and DPNs, with CPNs emerging as the predominant category.

Given the diverse categories of PNs, various interpreting strategies were employed, such as transliteration, translation, transliteration plus translation, transliteration plus addition, and translation plus addition. However, as PNs fall into distinct categories, their interpretation demanded diverse interpreting strategies such as transliteration, translation, transliteration plus translation, transliteration plus addition, and translation plus addition. However, in the specific context of live SI for high-profile political speeches on TV, certain emergency strategies, specifically omission and compression, were extensively employed by some TV interpreters to address challenging PNs or difficult segments that incorporated PNs. Therefore, some straightforward PNs were simply left out by some TV interpreters in several cases, such as Britain, Wednesday, Commonwealth, Silver Jubilee, Duke of Cornwall, among others.

In addition to emergency strategies, interpreters primarily chose transliteration as the predominant strategy for most categories of PNs. Many CPNs used by the speaker lacked sense, such as “William,” “Camilla,” and “Catherine,” making transliteration a suitable choice. In certain instances, transliteration entailed naturalized borrowings where the transliterated item conveyed both form and sense in the TL such as اليوبيل البلاتيني for Platinum Jubilee.

Regarding the correlation between the category of the PN and the used interpreting strategy, three notable observations emerge. Firstly, a strong correlation exists between CPNs and transliteration. Apart from emergency strategies, the prevalent approach for interpreting CPNs involves transliteration, where the sense is of minimal importance. Secondly, a significant correlation is observed between DPNs and the strategies of translation and translation plus transliteration. Interpreters appear to recognize the importance of conveying the sense of the predicates. For example, Old Palace was rendered into القصر القديم and Golden Jubilee into اليوبيل الذهبي. Third, EPNs tend to be rendered by translation plus transliteration; CPNs involved in EPNs are transliterated, whereas predicates are translated, such as كنيسة إنجلتراfor Church of England.

In conclusion, TV simultaneous interpreters engaged in live interpretation between English and Arabic should prioritize thorough preparation. Professional interpreters are advised to dedicate time before each interpreting assignment to gain a comprehensive understanding of the topics to be addressed, acquaint themselves with specific terminology, and gather other relevant information. Numerous scholars contend that acquiring topic-specific knowledge in advance can positively impact the quality of simultaneous interpretation, enhancing the ability to anticipate and predict information (Seleskovitch, 1978). Additionally, it may prove beneficial to create a glossary containing specialized terms, including PNs, along with their equivalents in the TL (Donovan, 2005; Moser-Mercer, 2011).