The paper investigates the differences between written translation and
simultaneous interpretation (SI) from a pragmatic perspective. In
particular, some concepts, developped by Goffman are applied to SI
analysis. The starting point is the “orality” of SI, considered in terms of
the physical means of transmission. SI is characterized by the folowing
situational macro-traits: the phonic-acoustic means, the shared context
of utterance and the simultaneous presence of the interlocutors. The
paper discusses also the following points: discreteness vs. linearity, the
activation of psycholinguistic mechanisms, planned vs. unplanned
discourse, the impossibility of deleting (the phenomen of self-correction,
redundancy and problems of performance), evanescence of the oral
message, the importance of prosody, frequent recourse to non linguistic
and paralinguistic means, extensive use of deixis, the importance of the
phatic function and the shared knowledge of the participants.
