As often happens with invited speakers, who are introduced by well-briefed chairpersons as needing no introduction, and then lengthily introduced after all, it could be said that this book needs no introduction. Most people would expect a volume with the title “Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies” simply to give access to the knowledge available about interpreting, as developed in the academic field of study which gives the book its name. Indeed, the less familiar prospective readers are with this discipline, the more likely they are to skip this Introduction. With little need to take an interest in “The Making of...”, they will assume that this Encyclopedia contains articles on the most relevant topics, written by those who know the subject best, and presented in the most appropriate form. Readers with more knowledge about the field, in contrast, may well have a greater interest in the rationale underlying this particular presentation of the state of the art in interpreting studies. The questions they might be asking about how this volume has been put together will be addressed here under a number of why-questions about the book and its contents, contributors, features and structure. This will not so much make the volume more usable (by offering guidance in a “how to use this book” format), as enhance its value for the scholarly community by making explicit some of the main choices and principles shaping its content, allowing fellow scholars to understand– and question– authorial and, in particular, edi torial decisions, and thus reflect on how this account of their field of study might possibly be improved. Why this book? This Encyclopedia goes back to an idea in one of the relevant departments at Routledge to publish a reference volume similar to that edited for translation studies by Mona Baker (Baker 1998; Baker & Saldanha 2009). An invitation to take interest in such a project reached me on 1 July 2011, and drew considerable skepticism. Admittedly, the idea of a ‘companion volume’ had worked very well twice before, and given our field both The Inter preting Studies Reader (Pöchhacker & Shlesinger 2002) and the 2004 textbook analogous to Jeremy Munday’s (2001) Introducing Translation Studies, now in its third edition. The idea of a parallel encyclopedia project seemed more problematic, however, given the coverage of interpreting in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, under such headwords as ‘community interpreting’, ‘conference interpreting’, ‘court interpreting’, ‘dialogue interpreting’, ‘interpretive approach’, ‘relay’ and ‘signed language interpreting’. Moreover, comprehensive reference volumes on translation and interpreting studies had been prepared by other pub lishers, including, first and foremost, the Benjamins Handbook of Translation Studies (Gambier & van Doorslaer 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013), the Wiley Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Chapelle 2013), with a section on translation and interpreting coordinated by Claudia Angelelli, Brian Baer and Nadja Grbic ´, and the more compact Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies (Malmkjær & Windle 2011)– not to mention Routledge’sownHand book of Translation Studies (Millán & Bartrina 2013), in preparation at the time. With interpreting types and topics broadly represented in these volumes, usually by leading authors in the field of interpreting studies, it seemed doubtful, at best, whether there would be room, or need, for yet another reference volume on interpreting (studies). The aim of offering added value was therefore the principal motivation behind my pro posal for this book, submitted to the publisher, not without hesitation, in late 2011. Based on favorable responses from four reviewers, the project went ahead and a contract was signed– before I learned of parallel plans for The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting (Mikkelson & Jourdenais 2015). All the more reason to make this Encyclopedia a unique resource, with qualities not found in other reference volumes in the field of translation and interpreting studies. The rationale for this volume, shared by most of the titles mentioned above, is to take stock of existing knowledge about interpreting. Efforts to do so were made on other occa sions, and in other forms, in the past; examples include the 1994 Turku Conference on “Interpreting: What Do We Know, and How?”, alluded to in the title of this Introduction, and the 2006 volume of Linguistica Antverpiensia entitled Taking Stock: Research and Metho dology in Community Interpreting (Hertog & van der Veer 2006). The shift of emphasis toward community interpreting, and the fact that the proceedings volume of the Turku Conference (Gambier et al. 1997) ended up with ‘conference interpreting’ in its title, despite other types of interpreting being in evidence at that event, point to the fundamental objective of the present volume– that is, to achieve a single, detailed survey of the field that would include the various domains and research traditions of interpreting not only side by side, but in an inte grated manner. This has major implications for the structure of the book as a whole, and for the content of individual articles. What it essentially means is that every article reflects an effort by its author to cover the headword, where applicable, across domains, modes and set tings. Notwithstanding the often uneven pattern of research on any given topic, contributors have been asked to look beyond the type and modality of interpreting they may be specialized in, and consider the relevance of their topic in other areas of work. The aim of making this volume comprehensive would be a more evident aspiration for an encyclopedia. In practical terms, comprehensive coverage is attempted in this book not only by ensuring breadth (e.g. by including less familiar topics) but also, and especially, by achieving depth. This depth of coverage relates to the choice of headwords, as explained in greater detail below. Rather than make do with the basic typological points of reference found in comparable publications (e.g. Baker & Saldanha 2009), the present volume has a fine-grained conceptual structure that allows the reader to zoom in and out, as it were, from familiar central categories. It is thus the goal of providing an integrated– that is, coherent and detailed– account of the topic, through a multi-layered arrangement of headwords in a differentiated conceptual structure, that made this Encyclopedia a project worth under taking. If the volume meets its intended purpose of providing a coherent web of knowledge (or a ‘hypertext’, in the original sense of the term), the rationale for this Encyclopedia will have been fully achieved. Accent as a feature of output quality An interpreter’s strong accent would be likely to make listeners’ comprehension more diffi cult. Since it is the interpreter’s professional task to facilitate understanding, it seems safe to assume that a professional interpreter’s non-native accent in the B language will not be so marked as to detract from intelligibility. Indeed, the results of SURVEY RESEARCH on USER EXPECTATIONS indicate that both conference interpreters and delegates rate a native accent as less important than such QUALITY CRITERIA as ACCURACY and faithfulness (FIDELITY) to the source message. However, there may be variations in non-native accent tolerance among linguistic groups. For instance, it has been suggested that English and Russian listeners may be more tolerant of an interpreter’s non-native accent than French listeners (Bartło miejczyk 2004; Kalina 2005a; Martin 2005). Moreover, the location in which SI takes place may also determine the degree of importance placed upon an interpreter’s native accent. For instance, a native German accent is a clear prerequisite when interpreters work for German TV stations (Kurz & Pöchhacker 1995) and for conferences that take place in Germany (Kalina 2005a). In addition, preferences for regional accents also vary. Although Taiwan and China both have Mandarin Chinese as their official lan guage, the Taiwanese participants in Chang’s (2009) study gave the highest rating of professionalism to a Mandarin interpreter perceived to be from Taiwan, whereas the participants from China gave the highest such rating to the interpreter perceived to be from that country. How users evaluate the quality of SI with a non-native accent is therefore elusive. Cheung (2003) and Stévaux (2007), for instance, show that non-native accents can have a negative influence on SI listeners’ quality perceptions, whereas research done in the context of various MA theses has yielded contradictory findings. However, all of these studies were conducted in an experimental setting, and the participants may have behaved differently from genuine conference attendees listening to SI. In an effort to enhance validity, Cheung (2013) incorporated the “need for SI” into his experimental study of how native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong rate SI into Cantonese by one native and two non-native interpreters: the requirement that participants take a comprehension test before filling in an evaluation questionnaire ensured that they would follow the interpretation attentively. The native Cantonese-speaking participants rated the two non-native interpreters (a native Mandarin speaker and a native English speaker) significantly lower than the native interpreter. The slightly higher rating given to the interpreter with a Mandarin non-native accent than to her counterpart with an English non-native accent may be attributed to participants’ familiarity with Mandarin-accented Cantonese, as China is Hong Kong’s major source of migrants. Although most studies on non-native accents focus on simultaneous conference interpret ing, interpreters with non-native accents also operate in other MODES and SETTINGS. Hale, Bond and Sutton (2011), in a study of CONSECUTIVE INTERPRETING in a mock courtroom set ting, found that interpreters’ non-native accents did not affect how source speakers were perceived.
