While the discipline of Translation Studies (TS) at large was born out of the ini tiative of scholars from the world of literature interested in translation, Interpret ing Studies (IS) was started by interpreting practitioners and interpreter trainers who still represent the overwhelming majority of authors in the field. A discipline populated and driven by such practitioners-cum-researchers (“practisearchers”) is an interesting object of research in itself, especially when many of them, includ ing many of the most prominent authors in the field, have had little or no training in research. One striking feature of early history of IS is the important role played in its development by “personal theorizing”, i.e. systematic individual reflection on one’s professional experience. It is such personal theorizing by pioneer Danica Seleskovitch which led to the crystallization of the Interpretive Theory para digm, a set of ideas about the nature of the interpreter’s (and translator’s) work which has become the backbone of translator and interpreter training methods in many parts of the world (a recent update of the ideas making up this paradigm is offered in Lederer 2006). Personal theorizing has the major advantage of being highly relevant to the phenomena at hand – but it is also self-limiting. Genuine engagement with other theories as well as empirical research are required to enrich it, correct it, and bring in new perspectives. Within conference interpreting, wide interaction between researchers started in the early 1990s, as evidenced inter alia by citations patterns. It gradually grew from small local networks with few links between them to wider networks with links to various schools of thought and some cognate disciplines, mostly linguistics, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and neurophysiology (Gile 2006). More recently, with the development of research into public service/ community interpreting (PSI), significant interaction has started beyond confer ence interpreting and between various branches of IS, including interpreting in court and hospitals, as well as for medical consultations, asylum seekers etc.
