Chapter 1 Interpreting and technology: The upcoming technological turn Claudio Fantinuoli University of Mainz 1 Introduction The topic of technology is not new in thecontext of interpreting.However,recent advances in interpreting-related technologies are attracting increasing interest from both scholars and practitioners. This volume aims at exploring key issues, approaches and challenges in the interplay of interpreting and technology, a do main of investigation that is still underrepresented in the field of Interpreting Studies. The contributions to this volume focus on topics in the area of computer assisted and remote interpreting, both in the conference as well as in the court setting, and report on experimental studies. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first book entirely dedicated to this subject. Its publication should not be considered a point of arrival in research work on interpretation and technology, but rather as an occasion to give new momentum to the analysis of a topic that is both current and complex. In this field further in-depth research is necessary in order to better understand the past and future impact of technology on interpretation, on the one hand, and to prepare future generations of interpreters to adapt to a constantly changing market, on the other. 2 Setting technology into the interpreting perspective When compared to written translation or other language professions, the ad vances in information and communication technology have had a modest impact on interpreting so far. In its long history, however, interpreting has not been im mune to technological innovations. On the contrary, it has gone through at least two major technological breakthroughs with disruptive effects on the profession in both cases. The first breakthrough was the introduction of wired systems for speech trans mission that led to the rise of simultaneous interpreting (si). First attempts in this direction werereported in the early1920s,withapatentfiledbyIBManditsadop tion at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in the former Soviet Union and at the International Labour Conference. This technology acquired broader visibility during the post war Nuremberg trials and was adopted since then in all interna tional organizations. Although the cognitive process of translating while listen ing to the source speech was not new (chuchotage has been probably around for ever), the invention of simultaneous interpretation equipment radically changed the way interpretation was delivered on a daily basis. This technological break through also had an impact on social status and self-perception of interpreters. At the beginning, interpreters feared a loss of quality in their performance and perceived the relegation into interpreting booths and the need to abandon the stage they used to share with diplomats as a worsening of the prestige associ ated to the profession and, consequently, of their social status. In reality, the broad adoption of si together with the increasing demand for interpreting ser vices due to geopolitical changes in the second half of the 20th century led to a professionalization of the whole sector and, in turn, to a general improvement of the occupational status of interpreters.1 The second technological breakthrough that has affected interpreting practice is the Internet. The emerging of the Web in the 1990s radically changed inter preters’ relation to knowledge and its acquisition. Since preparation is one of the fundamental aspects of interpreting (Gile 2009), as it is crucial to fill the linguistic and knowledge gap between event participants and interpreters, the impact of this technology on the profession has been extraordinary. The Web is the most comprehensive and accessible repository of textual material available in many languages and on many topics. Interpreters use it in a lot of different ways, for example to conduct exploratory research before they receive actual conference material (Chang et al. 2018), to create specialized corpora for linguistic analyses (Fantinuoli 2017a; 2018b; Xu 2018) or simply to find translations for specialized terms.
