Aptitude testing. I’ve been involved in the study of aptitude for conference interpreting since 1992 (1992-2001 University of Trieste; 2001 todate Univ. of Bologna). I developed an aptitude test based on an oral Italian-Italian on-line paraphrasing exercise which was administered to several cohorts of candidates to entrance examinations. The academic results of those admitted were monitored over the years, in order to verify the predictive value of the test, as indicated by the numerous relevant publications.
Corpus-based interpreting studies (CIS). Leader of the project “Directionality and simultaneous interpreting: language pairs and strategies” launched in 2004 by a multidisciplinary team with the aim to develop the first on-line interpreting corpus ever developed nationally and internationally, the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus (EPIC). So far EPIC has been investigated by researchers who published extensively and by students for their graduation theses. It is freely accessible at http://sslmitdev-online.sslmit.unibo.it/corpora/corporaproject.php?path=E.P.I.C . and distributed in transcript-audio-video format by the European Language Resource Association (ELRA) exclusively for research purposes at http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1145 . On May 7th-8th 2015 we organized “Corpus-based Interpreting Studies: The State of the Art. First Forlì international workshop” attended by leading scholars in the field. My CIS research is still particularly active.
Simultaneaous film interpreting (SFI). This line of investigation was inspired by my profession as interpreter at film festivals and by theoretical reflections on it. SFI requires skills linked both to literary translation and to conference interpreting. The former implies the linguistic sensitivity and the expressive skills which are necessary to transfer the wide range of film language varieties and registers. The latter implies the ability of listening and speaking at the same time in sync with the film actors and of managing different linguistic and semiotic codes simultaneously.
Spanish-Italian Contrastive Linguistics. In addition to lexical and pragmatic analyses, my research focuses on morpho-syntactic asymmetries and their effects during simultaneous interpreting, in order to investigate their peculiarities and to develop suitable teaching strategies.
Public service interpreting. I’m mostly concerned with interpreter-mediated interaction in legal and court settings.
Remote interpreting. In the light of the ever-increasing market demand for remotely-interpreted events, within the framework of the SHIFT project, I am analysing differences and similarities in both monolingual and interpreter-mediated bilingual face-to-face and remote communicative events, with reference to health, service and legal settings. The final objective of the research is the development of adequate theoretical models and training modules.
Humanitarian interpreting. This is a new field of research which is linked to the project with the University of Geneva “Pilot course in humanitarian interpreting” and aimed at understanding and meeting the communicative and educational needs of the triad refugee-interpreter-public official.
Educational interpreting. Another new research field: Simultaneous interpretation of academic lectures between EN<>IT to favour inclusion and multilingualism at Unibo.
Computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools. Another new research field linked to the European project SmarTerp – SMARTER INTERPRETING: Seamless Management and Automation of Resources and Tools for an Efficient Remote Simultaneous Interpreting
