Preface Sometimes conference interpreting is considered to be an expensive luxury. The interpreters, it is argued, often perform a service for only a handful of listeners and, these days, everyone should understand English. At the same time they may be seen as semi-automatons, a kind of translating machine performing no more than an automatic transfer process. And when things go wrong and misunder standings or even diplomatic incidents occur, it is they who get the blame. The physical conditions in which simultaneous conference interpreters work have no doubt contributed to a widespread impression of remoteness and automa tism as characteristic of their work. In the classic conference setting, the inter preter is literally invisible – placed in a soundproof, glass-fronted booth usually orthogonal to or directly behind the sightlines of the receivers of their output. Their voice is heard solely through headphones, disembodied as it were and yet connected in some mysterious way (for the layperson) to what is going on before participants’ eyes. The linkage of the interpreters’ voice to the ebb and flow of the voice of the speaker who holds the floor, such that pauses, emphases, resumptions and so on are reflected, some seconds later, in the interpreter’s output, reinforces an impression that some kind of automatic process is at work. At the same time, especially for those who, having no knowledge of the source language, rely on their interpreters for comprehension of what is being said, there is a magical ele ment, akin to that experienced when witnessing real-time machine translation: just how does it all happen? Little wonder then that early investigations of the conference interpreter sought to shed light on how this process takes place and more specifically on men tal processing: how does the interpreter divide attention between competing stim uli? What is the role of short-term memory? How does “chunking” take place? How do interpreters monitor their output at the same time as processing new in put? Is meaning “de-verbalised” in the translation process? Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic questions such as these generated a fascinating body of research, involving a good deal of empirical experiment and leading to real insights into interpreters’ practices and processes. Many of these findings also found their way into training programmes, by way of advice on pausing, on “ear-voice span”/“décalage”, on the advisability, for example, of shadowing as a training exer cise and so on. Typically though, the subject of the research was “the interpreter” – as an en tity rather than as a person. Research data were quite often assumed to represent “interpreting” in general and “the interpreter” as a unified phenomenon. The in terpreter’s mind was the focus of attention while contextual factors such as person ality, concern for quality, responsiveness to criticism or coping with special situa tions such as a chairperson interrupting or speaking at the same time as a speech-maker tended to be seen as unhelpful distractions. Indeed, it is fair to say that simultaneous interpreting research has been dominated by studies of cogni tion and of response to stimuli from its beginnings in the 1950s until quite re cently. By contrast, when scholars from the late 1970s onwards began to investi gate the activity variously known as community, public service or liaison interpreting, they naturally focused on the salient contextual features of the event: face-to-face interaction, dialogue and a three-party negotiation of turn taking in spontaneous interaction. It soon became apparent that interpreters were full par ticipants in the events in which they acted, that they had their own goals and that their decision making could lead in a variety of different directions, influencing the outcome of the event. Context, in these studies, was now very much to the fore. Indeed, research in community interpreting now regards the interpreter as a social being, in a social context, with wants, desires, needs and instinctive reactions and so on in addition to the institutional goals they seek to serve. For a while it seemed as if these very different types of interpreting – confer ence and community, as they were most commonly called – lent themselves to wholly different research questions and forms of investigation. It was not until Ebru Diriker’s ethnographic study of 2001, published in 2004 as De-/Re-Contextu alising Simultaneous Interpreting, that attention was systematically drawn to the professional conference interpreter as a person in a context, actively involved in what is going on, speaking on their own behalf as well as on behalf of those they translate. Now at last evidence is emerging of interpreters not merely fulfilling a normative role, that of automatically and neutrally representing another’s talk, but also reflecting and representing their own selves.
