The First Forlì Conference on interpreting studies in November 2000 is a milestone in the history of Italian interpretation research. If the contributions to the Trieste Symposium in 1986 came predominantly from interpreting scholars working outside Italy, fifteen years later the balance has been decidedly redressed. Much water has flowed under many institutional bridges. Interpreting and translation studies are now autonomous academic disciplines. There are now in Italy two full professorships of interpreting studies with the prospect of more to come in the near future. A dozen or so associate professorships and roughly the same number of research assistants promise to carry interpreting research well into the future. Institutional recognition of the importance of interpreting studies is vital. Interpreting staff on short-term contracts rarely have the opportunity to defend and assert the needs of interpreting pedagogy and interpreting research in an academic context which has frequently, hitherto, hoveredbetween hostility andindifference in most of Europe. It is comforting to reflect that Italy might well be right out in the forefront in this field. Conference interpreting no longer holds uncontested sway either in the lecture hall or in the researcher’s study. Its very specific requirements continue to be respectedandinvestigatedbut other new andexciting opportunities have opened up promptedby the energy andinitiative of some of the conference participants. A Eurocentric view of interpretation has been overtaken by events. There will, thanks to the EU, always be a needfor conference interpreting from andinto the official languages of all EU members, but by 2010 there will almost certainly be moreEU citizens with Arabic, Hindi, Turkish or Urdu as their mother tongue than citizens with Estonian or Slovene. May we be certain that they will master the official EU languages to an extent enabling them to benefit to the full from their civic rights? By no means. In their dealings with the state, in courts of law and in hospitals or surgeries, they will have the right to demand expert, not improvised linguistic assistance.
