1. Introduction When,inearly 2008, wecameupwiththethemeofthesixthCritical Link confer ence our aim was merely to respond in a well-meaning inductivist fashion to a reality whose changing nature was certainly bewildering but seemed conceptually manageable. We felt it was time to take stock of what globalization processes, new humanmigrationpatternsandtheresulting socio-political phenomena meant for research and practice in interpreting. Since then, the reality in which interpreters work has changed so much that our theme could not be more apt. The Critical Link 6 delegates held their discussions in July 2010, with the economic crisis ram pant and the events of the Arab Spring just a few months away. Three years later the crisis is claiming ever newgroundandpoliticalchanges intheArabworld(but also elsewhere) seem to be far from over. The changing economic and political landscape has meant budgetary cuts and forced mobility. These in turn translate into a variety of new phenomena of relevance to interpreting, e.g. multilingual ism in traditionally monolingual societies, the emergence of rare language pairs, or the need to revisit language solutions for immigration application procedures, social welfare institutions or prisons. Cross-cutting this cascading sequence are relatively old problems which have acquired a new urgency, e.g. the role(s) of the interpreter, emergency interpreting or the (mis)use of technology, to name just a few. In putting this volume together our aim has been both to introduce new, and revisit existing issues in interpreting research. All papers in this volume were originally presented at the 2010 Critical Link conference and then re-written, refereed, and revised to be selected for inclusion. In this introductory chapter, we address some of the socio-economic and socio political challenges providing the background to the contributions. . The impact of a changing world A phenomenon with arguably the most far-reaching implications for interpret ing practice in its entirety is that of countries, especially European ones, which have not hitherto been immigration destinations (e.g. Italy or Spain) now finding themselves receiving migrants escaping poverty and war. Many of them speak languages of lesser diffusion such as Amharic, Tigrinya and Tamil. Similarly, the enlargement of the European Union has meant new challenges for a number of Western European countries, where diverse and sizeable migrant populations have been arriving from Eastern Europe since 2004. The full implementation of the Human Rights Act (2000) in the UK and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), together with the recent EU Directive (2010/64/EU) on the right to interpreting and translation in criminal proceedings which will come into force in the Autumn of 2013 (see Martin and Herráez, this volume), means that public services need to adapt more than ever before to the needs of a multilingual society. Coincidentally, all this is taking place at a time of a global financial crisis. All over Europe public services are being affected by significant cuts in expenditure; societies have been experiencing a protracted period of unprecedented financial austerity due to the diminution of the tax revenue base and problems of the world banking system. Large parts of the public sector are in many countries being out sourced to private multinational companies. In the UK, for example, this has had an immediate and disastrous effect upon the quality of court and police interpret ing and even upon the very availability of interpreters. Many of the gains which had been made inthe UKoveraperiodoftwentyyears have been set aside by the government(for example,formalqualificationsandtrainingforlegal interpreters, the establishment of the National Register of Public Service Interpreters and the National AgreementonArrangementsfortheUseofInterpreters, Translators and LanguageService Professionals in Investigations and Proceedings in the Criminal Justice System, 2007) and the very future of the profession now seems quite bleak. Similar developments are being reported from other countries in the world. 3. Reflecting on the status of interpreting and the role of interpreters Whilst activists, who are often both academics and practitioners, remain defiant on the political front, there is still no universal agreement on what the role of the interpreter should be, as evidenced by some of the papers in this volume. Should the role differ according to setting? Is the role of the interpreter as a cultural me diator acceptable in some settings but not in others? Does interpreter-mediated communication always involve cultural mediation? What is the relationship be tween ethical practice and interpreting? Questions about the role of interpreters are linked to the question of what interpreting is nowadays. Within the discipline of Translation and Interpreting Studies definitions of interpreting have been changing. The same applies to defi nitions of translation, and, in fact, interpreting has often been subsumed under the label of Translation (Studies). The issue has been debated repeatedly whether Interpreting Studies could constitute a research area in its own right, separate to Translation Studies. Translation and Interpreting Studies has become the widely accepted label (see, for example, Pöchhacker and Shlesinger 2002). When translation and interpreting became objects of more systematic re search in the 1950s, both were initially defined in the narrow sense of transfer. Thefocusofresearchwasthecomparisonof linguistic systems inorderto identify the potential equivalent units (at lexical and also syntactic level) which would be readily available for transcoding a message faithfully into the target language. This view of translation and interpreting as a mechanical process was linked to a communication model which described meaning transfer from a source to a tar get via some channel (speech or written text), assuming no loss during transfer. The communicative partners involved were labelled sender and receiver, with the translator or interpreter in the middle as a conduit transferring the message. In the development of interpreting research specifically, the initially domi nant conduit model has been challenged by researchers focusing on the triadic nature of interpreting as interaction (Wadensjö 1998; Mason 2001). Investigating interpreting (and also translation) as interaction automatically means including in the analysis the socio-cultural, institutional and situational context as well as actual people in their respective roles and power positions. As a consequence, translators and interpreters have been featuring much more prominently in the literature and new research questions have been asked. In Interpreting Studies, this focus on the role of the interpreter has been much more prominent for Public Service Interpreting (PSI) compared to Conference Interpreting, since the variety and unique nature of public service settings pose more challenges for interpret ers. The conduit model, although still seen by a large number of PSI users as the only one valid, has in Interpreting Studies research been either replaced or com plemented by models with the interpreter as an intercultural mediator, a culture broker, or a co-therapist (see especially the papers in Part I of this volume). This shift in theoretical reflection is largely motivated by the changing landscape of PSI practice. With countries becoming more and more multilingual and multicultur al, PSI needs are growing, and the complexity of contexts and settings (police in terviews, probation meetings, asylum hearings, healthcare, education etc.) as well as individual life stories and social profiles
