The European Parliament as a source of material for research into simultaneous interpreting: advantages and limitations

This paper presents advantages and limitations characterizing the use of research material from the European Parliament to investigate simultaneous interpreting as a communicative activity. Reference is made to the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus as a prime example of the many advantages the EP can provide researchers with. However, the particular features of EP plenary sittings should be emphasized not only for making it a valuable, easy-to-access data source, but also for its specificity and resulting limited representativeness of what SI-mediated communication can be.