This paper analyses the issue of Culture-Bound Elements (CBE) and their rendition
in simultaneous interpretation. It focuses on the 2012 US Presidential Debates between
the democratic President Barack Obama and the republican candidate Mitt
Romney. The analysed interpretations were provided by four television channels
which aired the debates live: RaiNews24 and SkyTG24 in Italy, Canal24Horas in
Spain and the Spanish-speaking broadcasting company Univisión in the USA. All
the video material was transcribed and added to CorIT, the Television Interpreting
Corpus of the University of Trieste. The paper begins with a discussion of the features
of media interpreting compared to conference interpreting. The second part
discusses the importance of culture in shaping and understanding a message, culture-
bound elements, their nature and the strategies that interpreters can adopt to
deal with them. The third part presents the debates, the interpreting teams and the
transcription process carried out. The fourth section offers the analysis of some
examples of how the interpreters dealt with the CBEs in the case study. Finally, the
last section contains statistical data on the strategies used by the four teams and
the conclusions reached on their overall success in dealing with CBEs.
