This chapter looks at political rhetoric in the European Parliament, focusing on speech
acts and the way they are conveyed by interpreters. Discourse in the European Parliament
is a specific genre with speech acts constituting an integral rhetorical element of the genre.
Following an analysis of an authentic corpus comprising more than 100 speeches in
four languages, delivered in the European Parliament, the theoretical framework of the
present chapter focuses on speech act theory, and the way it can be used to complement
translation and interpreting theories in a close analysis of SI performances. The aim of the
analysis has been to use authentic data in order to obtain some specific information that
could be applied to interpreter training, as well as suggesting an approach for interpreter
quality assessment.
