This book is about dialogue interpreting, an activity which in various ways has formed a major part of my professional life over the past two decades. Working with interpreting, as a freelance interpreter and as a researcher, I have been lucky to meet many colleagues who have generously shared their insights in the complex and fascin ating world of communication in face-to-face interaction. Interpreters are used to not being seen, and sometimes pride themselves on 'disappearing' in the background. I would be happy if this book contributes to making them and their profession more visible. The studies which form the basis of this book were funded by grants from four Swedish grant-giving bodies, which I most grate fully acknowledge: The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (89/44), The Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (F 402:87), The Swedish Ministry of Labour (DEIFO 34/89) and the Swedish Council for Social Research (93-2002:1A). The book develops thoughts and perspectives which I first pre sented in my Ph.D. thesis (Wadensjo 1992). This early stage of the present book-project benefited enormously from constructive and crit ical comments from various colleagues, in particular Per Linell, my former advisor, and also from Karin Aronsson, Ann-Carita Evaldsson and Roger Saljo. I am lucky to have been able to profit from the generous and creative atmosphere of the Department of Communica tion Studies at Linkoping University also as a post-graduate. Among the guest-researchers, who have helped made Linkoping a rich environment for conducting research, I wish to mention in particular Jorg Bergmann, who read my thesis as a faculty opponent, and encouraged me to see new potentials for development, and David Middleton, who gave constructive feedback to the last chapter of the new manuscript. Over the years, a number of people - interpreters, instructors, students, researchers and others - have helped me clarify the theor etical, methodological and empirical issues which are explored in this book. I highly appreciate the feedback I have received from par ticipants at various forums where parts of the present work were presented, such as training courses for interpreters, seminars and conferences in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, social anthropology, trans lation and interpreting. Thanks to those who invited me. Above all, I wish to thank Chris Candlin, General Editor of the Language in Social Life Series, whose guidance and suggestions were most helpful in producing the final version of the manuscript. Spe cial thanks to Graham H. Turner for his critical proofreading of my English. Last but not least, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to those whose name I, for reasons of confidentiality, cannot mention - the interpreters and the people who occasionally needed their assistance in communicating - those who volunteered for my data collections. For generously accepting my intrusion in your everyday life, and letting me document and analyse your interaction, sincere thanks to you all. There is a sense in which interpreting has always been something of a poor relation to translating, seen as a professional activity. In part this impression may be due to the fact that the terms are frequently coupled, as if the former was naturally locked in with the latter, a sub-class of it, if you like, a natural enough a reaction, perhaps, in that one view would have each activity involved in language transfer in the process of recoding messages. Furthermore, although translating has an extraordinarily extensive and well documented professional history, one which has touched on many fields and in which it has established itself as a valued activity, say in literary studies, in history, in science and technology, or in poli tics and diplomacy, this cannot be said to anything like the same degree about interpreting, which seems to have been seen more as a craft, and while increasingly now regarded as a professional activity in its own right, with accreditation, standards and exten sive training, still has not, at least until relatively recently, been seen as a subject of much study and research. Perhaps like translation at one stage, there was and is a resist ance among interpreting practitioners to theoretical explanation based on empirical study. If this is the case within interpreting, it is no less true that in sister areas of research and scholarship like applied linguistics, where, although translating has always had a strong profile in conferences and publications, interpreting has hardly featured until quite recently. In the professional literature those references to research studies in interpreting one finds are, with very few exceptions, almost inevitably recent, in the last ten years, and for the most part related to policy and practice issues arising in key professions such as medicine, the law, diplomacy, or to matters concerning accreditation and professional development. Even within interpreting, as this book makes clear, the reflective emphasis has been on conference or courtroom interpreting rather than more broadly on what has come to be termed community interpreting. Furthermore, only some key figures have seen inter preting as much as a social as a linguistic process. It is significant, for example, that the first international conference on this community interpreting theme, in Canada, was only convened a few years ago. This separation of interpreting from empirical and theoretical research is hard to understand; after all, a moment's reflection would throw up a host of interesting and researchable questions surround ing the interpreting process. Some of these questions, of course, present themselves equally in the field of translating, for example how important matters of equivalence are to be handled, whether translating is to be seen as a monologic or as an interactive process, or what degrees of creative latitude are to be favoured in relation to given texts, or how, in an increasingly intertextual and interdiscur sive world, translators should best deal with issues surrounding the generic integrity of texts. Other questions have a particular sig nificance in the interpreting context, for example those concerning psycholinguistic matters of an individual practitioner's cognitive interpreting capacity, especially the relationship between real time processing and levels of accuracy in simultaneous interpreting, or the linguistic question of the variable demands posed on inter preters by different language systems and codes in the wide range of interpreting contexts that one might identify, or, as here in this innovative and original contribution by Cecilia Wadensjo to the Language in Social Life Series, the interactive sociolinguistic and inter cultural issues surrounding interpreting in the contexts of inter personal interaction in these community setting.
