ИСТИНА

Media (broadcast) interpreting is a rather specific type of audiovisual translation, which is generally done simultaneously (more seldom consecutively) for live TV/radio coverages such as press conferences, live news reports, and live or taped interviews. Recently, its field has also been extended to recorded simultaneous interpretation of a wide TV content, such as newscasts or popular science programs, serving as drafts for a target text, which after editing, checking and adaptation can be superimposed on the source video image in the form of subtitles, dubbing, or voiceover. Actually, media interpreting reveals a number of features that distinguish it from conference interpretation and other practices. Among its most salient features, one should highlight the “professional-lay” character of discourse addressed to an undifferentiated mass audience within an entertainment logic and a high synchronization requirement of speech delivery and video sequences. Hence, most experts agree on the need for a specific media interpreter training. In order to provide teaching and learning materials for such a training, a parallel spoken corpus of English and Russian multimedia texts BMMB has been designed. The corpus contains video clips and subsequent bilingual transcripts of open source TV news, analytical programs and political interviews for which two audio tracks in English and Russian are available whilst the video sequence is the same for each pair of corpus items. The verbal components of items can be qualified as partly parallel and partly comparable texts according to whether they represent voiced versions of source texts and their translations or texts originally written (spoken) in both languages on the same topic and/or conceived to accompany the same video. The BMMB corpus is currently being exploited through a series of exercises tailor - made for in-classroom use and trainees’ self-study activities within the framework of an audiovisual translation and media interpreting course for postgraduate students. However, it might be harnessed for other types of interpreter training and lexical knowledge acquisition as far as BMMB contains videos covering the most relevant topics of current international life.