In their introduction to the proceedings of the conference held in Forlì, Italy on Interpreting in the 21st Century, Garzone and Viezzi state that : “[…] the most sin gle element of novelty in the field [of interpreting studies] [is] the recognition that interpreting is not only conference interpreting” (Garzone and Viezzi 2002: 5). In deed, the last decades of the twentieth century saw an unprecedented increase in publications on interpreting in community settings: police and courts, hospitals, schools and social services. Catalyzed by the Critical Link conferences which be gan in 1995, there has been an exponential increase in studies of various types, ranging from the status quaestionis of countries where community interpreting is a recently-discovered reality to the in-depth corpus studies of interpreting in situ ated interaction. It is in this context that the 2nd International Conference on Public Service Interpreting was held at the University of Alcalá de Henares, Spain, in April 2005 under the title “Translation as Mediation or How to Bridge Linguistic and Cultur al Gaps”,1 bringing together researchers, educators and practitioners from Spain and abroad. One of the many events that took place during the conference was the presentation of the Comunica Group: a permanent observatory on commu nity interpreting needs and responses to those needs in Spain. Te idea to compile this volume began as an offshoot of that conference, initially inspired by the lively debates and excellent papers presented, and resulted in an invitation to scholars around the world to reflect on this topic more specifically or to report on empiric al and other research projects in this area. It is also a result of the University of Al calá’s cooperation with the University of Granada, where research into community interpreting has been a major feature for several years now, thus bringing together the two main focal points of research into this field in Spain. At the conferences mentioned above and in most of the publications on com munity interpreting, there is one burning issue which reappears constantly. It is that of the interpreter’s role. And it is logical that this should be the case if we think of the ingredients included in the cocktail that makes up community-based interpreting: wide cultural gaps, power imbalance, urgent communication needs, lack of resources, lack of professional profile, face to face interaction during situ ations which are often dramatic. However professionalised community interpret ing becomes, the interpreter is always liable to find herself in delicate, uncomfort able situations, the results of which are manifested in many, often subtle ways. She is frequently party to circumstances in which it would be difficult for any human being to remain unperturbed. In countries where a certain degree of awareness has been reached, there would seem to be a polarization — at least on paper — be tween the “impartial model” and the “cultural advocate model”. However, research has shown that the situation is much more complex than it may seem. Te seminal works of Berk-Seligson (1988), Roy (1993, 1996) and Wadensjö (1998) amongst others have demonstrated that interaction involving an interpreter is not simply a monolingual interview with an interpreter grafted on as a sort of code-switching machine. Te question is not whether the presence of the interpreter changes the interview, but how. Te complex issues that come into play as one attempts to an swer this question warrant the attention of the community interpreting research community. In countries where this form of interpreting has been professional ised, do codes of ethics, interpreters’ guidelines and standards of practice take account of the kind of dilemmas community interpreters are coming up against every day? Te distinction between “impartial model” and “cultural advocate” is not a compartmentalization but rather a cline, a continuum. Tere is no clear di viding line indicating where one model ends and the other begins, but rather it is a question of degree. Widely differing national contexts and needs, together with the infinite range of potential situations mean that it is extremely difficult if not impossible to establish across-the-board solutions which will always be applicable. Response to changes and new needs provoked by migratory flows has come in different forms and at a different pace depending on the country concerned and the social, historic and cultural factors involved, such as its language and immi gration policy.
