Strategies in simultaneous interpreting of French political discourse into Ukrainian (a case analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s press conferences)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of strategies in simultaneous interpreting of political discourse from French into Ukrainian. The relevance of the study is determined by Ukraine’s active participation in global political processes and the need to ensure high-quality French–Ukrainian simultaneous interpreting, which remains insufficiently studied in contemporary translation and interpreting studies. The aim of the study is to identify and analyze the strategies used by interpreters when rendering French political speech into Ukrainian, taking into account the structural and semantic asymmetries of the languages. The research material includes fragments of statements made by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, and their simultaneous interpreting into Ukrainian. The analysis showed that basic strategies prevail in simultaneous interpreting, namely anticipation, segmentation combined with pause distribution, compression, restructuring, and expansion. Their use is motivated by the need to ensure the continuity of translation in the context of complex French syntax, a high speech rate, and limited processing time. These strategies enable interpreters to effectively structure utterances, optimize the amount of information, and adapt it to the norms of the target language while preserving the logical coherence and communicative adequacy of the message. At the same time, in situations of increased complexity, interpreters employ emergency strategies, in particular omission, which have a compensatory character and allow them to maintain the pace of interpretation and avoid cognitive overload. The results of the study outline prospects for further optimization of simultaneous interpreting in the French–Ukrainian language pair, in particular through the development of skills for applying strategies in real time.