Ironically, the moment the book was published, no conference interpreter was able to make a living without precisely throwing themselves headfirst into VRI. Downie’s position was not absurd at the time he wrote the book. Back then, VRI was slowly gaining ground, but only covered a fraction of conference interpret ing assignments. The position of on-site interpreting seemed rock-solid. Then Covid struck and changed the whole industry (Cheung, 2022). By the summer of 2020, the share of VRI was virtually 100%. Most conference interpreters were caught completely unprepared. They had to acquire new skills and had to do so as quickly as possible, because every day they lost in the process was another day of income and competitive advantage lost. The main lesson to be learned from this is that, even if a particular piece of technology still has a long way to go before it is widely adopted, it is better to be aware of it and to think ahead than to ignore it. If the successive crises our societies have faced have taught us one thing, it is that knowledge and skills development and adaptation are key. This volume is an invitation to knowledge development and skills development in the interpreting community. Now, one may argue that the 2020 change did not come about because of the technology, and that is true: the technology was already there, albeit in its infancy. However, VRI technology appeared to adapt much faster to the pan demic than the interpreting community. The number of VRI providers exploded in a matter of months; as well as providers’ turnovers and investment plans. The technology developed at lightning speed, adding numerous features that turned out to have been completely overlooked in the early stages of technological development. More importantly, VRI technology split in various ramifications, offering interpreters and clients a wide array of all-in, side-by-side and add-in systems (Akhulkova et al. 2022). VRI technology also boosted other interpreting technologies: VRI platforms can easily integrate multiple information streams, making it possible to offer interpreters dedicated support tools (called computer assisted interpreting tools or CAI tools), such as number and term recogni tion (Fantinuoli 2018). While the conference interpreting community missed the opportunity to prepare for the breakthrough of VRI, it may still have a chance to prepare for the complex technological environment that the integration of VRI and support tools will bring. This volume contains contributions about dif ferent tools and the associated research: digital pen technologies (Chapter 1 by Marc Orlando), tablets used in interpreting (Chapter 2 by Joshua Goldsmith), CAI tools (Chapter 3 by Claudio Fantinuoli), and VRI (Chapter 4 by Diana Sin gureanu and colleagues). Technological progress creates inequalities (Krussel et al. 2000). Investments tend to concentrate on those who are expected to be able to afford new tools, leav ing other user groups on the sidelines. The interpreting profession is a profoundly dualistic community (Gentile 2016): on the one hand, there is a substantial group of highly educated and well-paid interpreters who work for international organi sations, either as staff or as freelancers. Their interests are safeguarded by a global professional organisation that negotiates acceptable working conditions. On the other hand, there is a very large group of public service interpreters (or com munity interpreters), whose working conditions are determined by national gov ernments or by the market. Education levels vary considerably in this group as well as membership of professional associations. There is little doubt that techno logical progress will widen the gap between both groups. Considerable amounts of money have been directed towards developing VRI platforms for simultane ous conference interpreting, while public service interpreters continue to work on the telephone or on meeting platforms that are not specifically designed for interpreting. As Runcieman (2020) puts it, they are still often seen as being con ference interpreters’ poorer cousins. CAI tools are being developed with simulta neous conference interpreting in mind. Even technologies that seem to be made for consecutive interpreting and could therefore be beneficial to public service providers, tend to widen the gap, as they presuppose prolonged training. Digi tal pen technology, for instance, requires interpreters to acquire specific skills in what is called ‘simconsec’ (Orlando 2014). To compensate for the one-sided focus on technology for conference interpreting, we have made room in this volume for dedicated chapters on technologies for public service interpreters (Chapter 5 by Stengers and colleagues) and on the presence of interpreting technologies in the Global South (Chapter 6 by Deysel). Many of the recent technological developments took place in a scientific vac uum.Whilenewinterpreting hardwareandsoftwareareusuallythoroughly tested for user experience, the VRI platforms were put to use in a context of emer gency. It turned out that the scarce available research on remote interpreting pre sented a serious mismatch with the most pressing issues the new technology faced interpreters with. Pre-covid research focused on video quality and the required bandwidth to ensure access to optimal visual input and optimal synchronisation with the audio stream (Mouzourakis 2006; Staelens et al. 2012; Seeber et al. 2019). Individual conference interpreters were turned upside down to analyse stress, cognitive load, fatigue, alienation and performance on site and online (Moser Mercer 2005; Roziner and Shlesinger 2010). However, as soon as conference inter preters had to turn to VRI during the pandemic, complaints tended to relate to sound quality, undisciplined meeting participants, and communication with the boothmate. Those vital aspects had been completely overlooked by the research community. Paradoxically, most of the research on VRI had been carried out on instances of dialogue interpreting using general purpose platforms (Braun 2015). We do not purport to cover all the relevant research questions in all the rele vant ways in this volume, but we have tried to look ahead, spotlighting develop ments of the future and the research that will be needed into how interpreters respond to those. Fantinuoli’s chapter (above) and Chapter 7 by Xiaojun Zhang and colleagues, for instance, contain thorough reflections on future CAI tools and future research tools to study multimodality in interpreter-mediated encounters. The multifaceted interplay of technology, cognition and interpreting is also cov ered by Mellinger (Chapter 8), with a view to revisiting current triadic models of interpreting in the light of (present and future) technological developments.
