The practice of arabic-spanish interpreting at the United Nations and the African Union and implications for training
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Abstract
Spanish and Arabic are official languages of both the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU). Given their professional interest to the students of the Arabic-Spanish linguistic combination (AR-ES), we wanted to explore the practice of interpretation in both languages in the two organizations. Given the paucity of previous literature, we opted for the hyphenated interview method. For this, we have the collaboration of two subjects of the UN and two of the AU. In this contribution, which emanates from our doctoral thesis defended on 03/12/2015 (Mahyub Rayaa, 2015), we start from the interest that both institutions arouse as interpretation providers and as a possible professional source of employment for the students that we train in AR-SP interpretation. This way, analyzing the practice of interpretation in these languages is of great academic and professional interest. The results obtained show surprising as well as novel data: the practice of AR-SP interpretation in the UN seldom occurs directly. To translate from Arabic to Spanish, the relay of the English or French booth is almost always used. In the AU, on the other hand, interpretation in these languages is reserved only for the annual summits of Heads of State. The interviews show relevant quantitative and qualitative results about how to work in the Arabic and Spanish booths, while having a direct impact on the professional future of the students and professional interpreters of AR-SP.
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