Thanks

I’m deeply indebted to my thesis advisor, Prof. Liesbeth Degand at the University of Louvain, and to Prof. Marie-Aude Lefer at the University of Louvain and Prof. Bart Defrancq at the University of Gent, for their guidance and support throughout this project.

I’m also very grateful to Sergey Kochetkov, Chief of the UN Interpretation Service, for his kind permission to use the recordings of his interpretation of President Obama’s speech into Russian and of the interpretation of the speech into Mandarin, from the UN Audiovisual Library; to European Commission staff interpreter Noémi Nagy and EU and AIIC freelance interpreter Aksel Vannus for generously recording their interpretation of the speech into Hungarian and Turkish; to expert freelance interpreter Tsugumi Kozuma for very generously recording and transcribing her interpretation of the speech into Japanese; and to Oleg Dogon and Marina Riapalova, interpretation trainers at the University of Louvain, and Xinjia Zu and Philip Yubang He, expert freelance interpreters, for their generous time and effort in transcribing the Russian and Mandarin recordings of the speech.

This project would not have been possible without the expert analysis and advice of Aurélie Bertrand at the Statistical Methodology and Computing Service of the University of Louvain.

I’m indebted to Dr. Daniel Gile for his guidance in the early stages of this study, and to Dr. Ronald Langacker and Dr. Karsten Schmidtke-Bode for valuable clarifications on their research.

Many thanks also to Figen Doğan, Sirine Nabi, Mohamed Nasreddine Nabi, Manami Forsyth and Kevin Chao for their help with Turkish, Arabic and Japanese sentences at various stages of this study, to Sing Sing Ngai for her patience with my Mandarin questions and her brilliant advice, and to David Albert for his invaluable help in understanding the statistical models.

Thanks also to Ebru Diriker, Riitta Valijärvi, Andy Hartley, Guy Laycock and Gregorio Villalobos for kindly reading the draft and providing their very useful insights, and to Suzanne Lambert for many hours spent discussing the finer points of this study and for her editorial eagle eye.

Finally, I’m very grateful to my family for their many years of patience and support during the various stages of this project.