Humour in simultaneous interpreting: a case of Eurasian media forum in Kazakhstan

Abstract

This qualitative, product-oriented observational study aims to analyse a case on humour in conference interpreting conditions in Kazakhstan, whether simultane- ous interpreters face the humorous utterances in someone’s speeches; moreover, the research pursues to observe the functions and types of humour there. The Kazakh case was studied hereby through the interpreters’ work at the Eurasian Media Forum, English and Russian language pairs. The given forum provides the recordings of past plenary sessions which were used as a data analysis tool. To my best knowledge, the present research is the first one which explores the Kazakhstan case. As a result, the research has proved that humour is often seen at conferences; moreover, it is used in terms of unifying listeners rather than dividing. Besides, plenarists tend to use witti- cisms and conversational humour for keeping an event in a positive mode.