Introduction When the editors asked me to write about conference interpreter training in China, I had to excuse myself: I may have participated modestly in one capacity or another in the setting up and activities of some Chinese training programs over the years, but I cannot claim to have a solid, accurate knowledge of the present scene. Chinese authors are in an infinitely better position to report and reflect on it, as indeed is done in the literature and in this collective volume. On the other hand, while monitoring international developments in conference interpreting research (CIR) as reflected in the CIRIN Bulletin since 1991 (https://cirin-gile.fr), I have had the opportunity to observe the spectacular development of Chinese research over the past two decades and am only too glad to write a few comments about some of its noteworthy features as a foreword to this volume. “Interpreting” vs. conference interpreting The existence of conference interpreting (CI) as a distinct profession was formalized in the early 1950s (Baigorri-Jalón 2000, 2015); the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) was created in Geneva in 1953. Academic and semi-academic publications on CI started in the 1960s in Europe and North America – and in Japan (Gile 1988). In the 1970s, interest in CI gave rise to a trickle of research publications, which turned into a regular, albeit small, flow in the 1980s (see the bibliographies on the CIRIN site). By the end of the decade, the flow had strengthened to a sufficient extent to justify the creation of a specialized journal, The Interpreters’ Newsletter, which was set up in 1988 by the University of Trieste, in Italy. It was followed in 1991 by Interpreting Research 通訳理論研究, which was set up in Tokyo by the Interpreting Research Association of Japan 通訳理論研究会, and in 1996 by Interpreting, an international journal published by John Benjamins. All three included papers on various types of interpreting beyond CI but were grounded in primary interest in research into conference interpreting. In China, as pointed out in Dawrant et al. (2022), the distinction between conference interpreting and other types of interpreting, in particular business interpreting, is not as clear as in the West, but many authors, including several who contribute in this volume, report that conference interpreting as a formally distinct category of interpreting started developing in the late 1970s, with the establishment of a training program in Beijing by the UN in cooperation with the Chinese government. Chinese publications on conference interpreting and on topics directly related to conference interpreting in English and other European languages were few until the end of the 1990s. Publications on interpreting started booming at the beginning of the 21st century, rising to 839 by 2007 (Wang and Mu 2009, 278). According to Dawrant et al. (2022), the foundation of three Chinese PhD programs in 2004 did a lot to boost research into interpreting in China. But the Chinese government’s decision to set up MTI degrees in 2007 (their number reached 316 in 2021 according to Dong and Chen, this volume) was arguably an even stronger driver of research production, because of the theses and publications requirements that came with them. As is the case in the global literature on interpreting, the largest number of publications on interpreting in China addresses interpreter training. This goes from textbooks (58 Chinese interpreting textbooks were reviewed in Yang and Li 2022) to articles published in conference proceedings, in collective volumes, in journals. When reading texts written in English and abstracts of texts written in Chinese, the impression is that the overwhelming majority of them addresses interpreter training in general as opposed to conference interpreting as it is defined in Europe and the Americas, even if they address techniques in the consecutive and simultaneous modes which, in the Western model, are generally discussed in relation to conference interpreting. This may be due to the fact that in China, save for a few exceptions, interpreter training is part of language teaching and enhancement, and only a small fraction of the students will eventually become conference interpreters.
