Interpreters’ roles in a changing environment

It seems beyond a doubt within the field of interpreting studies that the interpreter’s role changes over time and between settings and interpreting modes (Angelelli 2004, Baigorri-Jalón 2015; Pöchhacker 1999, 2016, 2019). According to role theory, role is defined as ‘a set of expectations society has of individuals in a given social position or status’ (Baert 2006: 524 in Pöllabauer 2015, 355). Role is discussed in interpreting studies with varying degrees of plasticity of social expectations. From a functional perspective, interpreters play the role of language conveyers; from a broader perspective, they act as conveyers of culture; and, finally, from a communicative perspective, mediators whose role is shaped by interaction (op. cit.). As a result, ‘interpreter role construction oscillates on a continuum between non-involvement and active agency (…)’ (op. cit.: 356). While in translation studies the creative and strategic roles of human translators are acknowledged (Hutchings 2021), the agency of human interpreters is far from widely accepted (Roy 1993/2002). Critical approaches to inter-linguistic correspondence within interpreter-mediated discourses vary among studies that examine different types of interpreting. The so-called ‘conduit-model’ of interpreting that is present in various codes of professional ethics promotes mechanistic renditions of putatively equivalent messages, preserving the invisibility of interpreters. At the other end of the spectrum, socio-cognitive research on interpreters’ role performance, fuelled by discursive analytical approaches (Monacelli 2009; Diriker 2003, 2004; Rosenberg 2002; Angelelli 2004; Okoniewska and Wang 2021), argues for differing degrees of agency in, for example, healthcare and conference interpreting. Therefore, the interpreter’s active role fluctuates according to context and expectations. Their role is acknowledged (Krystallidou, Langewitz, and van den Muijsenbergh 2021; Rodríguez Vicente, Napier, and de Pedro Ricoy 2021) and even deemed essential in medical settings (Delizée in this volume) and is compared with the role of seemingly context-neutral interpreter in conference interpreting (Monacelli 2009; Diriker 2004; Okoniewska 2019, Diriker in this volume). A conceptual reflection on interpreter involvement in interactional encounters (Pöchhacker 2005) and a sociological approach to the problem (Wadensjö 1998) find continuation in this volume, adding non-human agency to the equation (Pöchhacker in this volume) or promoting a systematic approach (Pym in this volume). Agency in interpreting is presented here against the backdrop of the (r)evolution of the environment in which interpreters train, work, dwell and survive. This environment can be defined in the socio-cognitive sense of context(s), that is, as ‘a set of properties of social situation that are possibly relevant for the production, structures, interpretation and functions of text and talk’ (Van Dijk 1998: 21 in Okoniewska and Wang 2021, 433). Contexts shape the social practices of the professional community as a social group, impacting the profession as a whole and individual career paths.

The dilemmas that individual interpreters face in their everyday practice range from meaning negotiation issues such as discourse comprehension (e.g. Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983) and balancing the accuracy (e.g. Gile 2009) and creativity (e.g. Horváth 2010) of the rendition while managing cognitive load (e.g. Seeber 2013) by employing coping strategies (e.g. Riccardi 2005) to maintain the fluency (e.g. Pradas Macías 2006) and quality of the rendition (e.g. Grbić 2008) within the bounds of self-preservation (e.g. Monacelli 2009), to contextual issues such as (inter)national laws and norms (e.g. ISO, see also Tiselius in this volume), professional codes (e.g. the International Association of Conference Interpreters Code of Professional Ethics), certifications (e.g. the Australian National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters and China Accreditation Test for Translators and Interpreters) and registers (e.g. the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf). Finally, there are challenges in professional training and interpreter education. For example, in the master-apprentice system, professional interpreters train novices (see e.g. EMCI Core Curriculum¹) and construct a circular system to which the interpreter is subject both at the beginning of the interpreting path, as a student, and quite often towards the end of their career, as a trainer. Such fluctuating roles lead to significant changes in perspective throughout the interpreter’s professional life and generate numerous questions. These questions can be related, but not limited, to aptitude testing (e.g. Russo 2011), pedagogical approach(es), bias towards theory-based or practice-based curricula (e.g. Orlando 2019; Setton and Dawrant 2016, Pym in this volume), student self-directed study and self-reflection (Gumul in this volume) and future-proofness. While answering all these questions, interpreters must additionally deal with the perception and representation of the profession by external systems (e.g. the judicial system in court interpreting or healthcare and media communities – see Pym, Delizée and Diriker in this volume) when negotiating their (in)visibility and status and educating clients about the conditions and specifics of their work within the changing markets in which they operate.

To that aim, the examination of interpreters’ visibility and status are paramount, especially in the context of the recent technology-driven (r)evolution of interpreters’ practice. While explorations of technology-transformed interpreting are blooming (Braun, Davitti, and Slater 2020; Davitti and Braun 2020; Fantinuoli 2021; Frittella 2022), this volume aims to follow the evolution of interpreters’ roles from the social perspective constructed in interpreting studies by Wadensjö (1998), Mason (1999) and Roy (2000), among others. A social framework caters to the examination of the context-dependent aspects of interpreting practice such as status, interaction and image representation. Status can be defined as ‘occupational prestige’, that is, ‘the social position an occupation or profession, in this case interpreting, affords its members, interpreters, on an (imaginary) prestige scale’ (Dam 2015, 400). Status is shaped by the process of professionalisation, which varies among contexts.

In this special issue, we bring together various reflections on changes to the interpreter profession and explore interpreters’ changing roles as professionals and trainers. In particular, we examine shifting theoretical models, inter-systemic variabilities, changing legal contexts of the profession, fluctuating perceptions of the interpreter’s image, the construction of interpreters’ relational agency and their own role awareness. The authors address these subjects from different angles, and the ensuing debate brings about constructive disagreement. This volume originated at the Institute of Intercultural Management and Communication (ISIT Paris, currently within Paris-Panthéon-Assas University) international conference held on 16–17 November 2018 by the Conference Interpreting Department entitled Discuss Interpreting. The conference aimed to gather professional interpreters (both those working for international organisations and private market interpreters) and interpreting scholars to discuss the interpreting profession, training and research. While ISIT is traditionally focused on training conference interpreters, the conference was purposefully unrestrictive regarding the type, mode, setting and context of the debated interpreting processes and products. This resulted in contributions on medical, legal and even theatre interpreting. The audience was similarly heterogenous, including staff interpreters from the European Parliament and the European Commission, as well as the OECD and the United Nations (from New York, Vienna and Geneva) and its various agencies, who contributed to the discussion. Last but not least, numerous freelance interpreters joined the debate, voicing their opinions and concerns. A scientific perspective was provided by scholars, who frequently acted as what Gile calls ‘practisearchers’, combining interpreting practice and academic activity, as well as by researchers who represented purely scientific perspectives towards interpreting studies. Pedagogical aspects were vividly discussed by trainers representing numerous interpreting schools and the EMCI and CIUTI consortia. The objective was to foster dialogue and forge alliances for future projects so that interpreting studies can progress informed by interpreting practice and training, and so that interpreting practice can draw on evidence-based research results. The many insightful discussions among participants were a testimony to the successful bridging of theory and practice at the conference.

The selection of articles in this volume draws from some of the debates, which took place in Paris, pointing to different directions for the evolution of interpreters’ roles both internal and external to interpreting practice and research. The special issue is framed by two introductory papers that offer an overview of conceptual shifts in interpreting and the potential for the existence of a professional system. The following four studies address a variety of topics that reflect the diverse issues at stake, approached from several angles. The authors rely conceptually not just on interpreting studies but also on discourse studies and sociology. Therefore, this special issue is comprised of various methodological approaches, drawing on Bourdieu, Luhmann, Krippendorff, Levinson and Halliday from the standpoints of content, text, read-aloud protocols and discourse analysis. The authors seek a unifying theme for interpreters’ roles in a changing environment, revealing multiple shifts.

At the most general level, and as an introduction to context-led changes to interpreters’ roles, Pöchhacker reflects on how the roles of interpreters are shaped by changing social contexts, offering an overview of major changes to the status (see also Pym and Diriker in this volume), mode and modality of interpreting and underscoring the process-related defining features of interpreting: immediacy, linguality and agency. Pöchhacker places the human agent at the centre of all processes of change. Evolving interpreter status is shaped by professionalisation, orchestrated by deliberate institutional policies and the creation of an educational framework (see also Tiselius in this volume) which, in turn, responds to the increasing demand for interpreters. Pöchhacker’s insightful reflections on how professional status is shaped through the fluctuation between acquired overtime, multilinguality and simultaneity in interpreting and the progressive return to dialogue and intralingual interpreting foregrounds orality as the defining feature of an interpreter system, an argument also advanced in this volume by Pym.

Pöchhacker skilfully demonstrates that interpreting as a social practice is undergoing major changes, faster and more wide-reaching than ever before, thus impacting the role of individual interpreters and the profession. After examining the evolution of the fundamental features of interpreting, Pöchhacker concludes that such conceptual (that is, fundamental) changes affect the human-centred definition of interpreting. That definition becomes permeable to machine agency which, even if harnessed carefully, will undoubtedly (r)evolutionise the profession and the understanding of interpreting as such.

Pym, approaching the interpreting profession from a sociological perspective, applies Luhmann´s sociology in the quest for an interpreter system, particularly drawing on social systems understood as communication with inter-systemic dependencies and the irritation markers operating at their boundaries. While examining the markers of (in)discrete separation from other systems, such as legal and educational systems, within the same utterance-centred environment, the author offers interpreting studies a chance to define the environment in which the interpreters operate. Such a definition, grounded in the dependencies and irritations that cater (or not) to interpreter system independence, is examined from the point of view of a particular type of dependence, namely, trust. Drawing on Luhmann (1988, 95), trust is defined as ‘a reduction of complexity’ as well as ‘a solution for specific problems of risk’. Why? Because ‘those who depend on interpreters usually cannot deal with the complexity of foreign languages themselves, so they have to trust us to take care of that complexity’ (Pym in this volume). In this way, Pym touches on the pre-conditions for interpreting pragmatics, that is, the selection of an interpreter for a given job, a question that is essential for any practitioner in the field.

The question of the trustworthiness of interpreters reveals the sources of the problems that interpreters confront while active on the market. From the perspective of an observer, Pym incisively demonstrates that signals of trustworthiness, funnelled through an interpreter system, become signals of status. By examining the trustworthiness of an interpreter system, Pym intends to answer whether inter-systemic relationships with interpreters indicate irritation or trust-based dependency. He insightfully identifies Luhmannian irritations that undermine the trustworthiness of a potential interpreter system: outsourcing interpreting to agencies, employing ‘whoever we find’ in urgent cases and binarism of theory and practice in interpreter training are the most flagrant examples. The last point of irritation is orality. A profession requires the written word to be regulated (see also Tiselius in this volume), but trust in an interpreter system is created by the immediate spoken interaction. Therefore, as Pym puts it, ‘If we want to define and strengthen interpreter systems, perhaps we should work from the virtues of the spoken’ (Pym in this volume).

Tiselius illustrates, at least to a certain extent, the systematic framework introduced by Pym. While exploring the ways in which public service, sign language and conference interpreting were shaped, professionalised and potentially disrupted by legislation in Sweden, she identifies Luhmannian irritations and dependencies between the legal system and interpreter pragmatics. Tiselius draws on legal and public documents (including government bills, codes, parliamentary decisions and so-called ‘special investigations’ from 1971 to 2018) in a search for the conceptual and contextual uses of the term ‘interpreter’ and its putative implications for the development of the profession. Tiselius explores what Pym identifies as ‘thick trust’, that is, trust established by legal acts, concluding that the interpreting profession in Sweden is shaped by public actions and documents, with the outcomes underscoring the domination of the written over the spoken in regulation. The content analysis of the use of term ‘interpreter’ in the Swedish legal corpus demonstrates the evolution of the provision of interpreting services and interpreter education, thus adding to Pym’s reflection on the signals of trustworthiness that are established between two communicating systems (legal and interpreting). The exploration of the conceptualisation of the term ‘interpreter’ in newspaper discourse, strikes a chord with the next paper in the volume devoted to the representation of interpreters in Turkish media.

Diriker applies the Bourdieuan theory of social capital to a quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of the media discourse on Turkish interpreters between 2017 and 2021. After establishing the accumulated prestige of the profession in terms of Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, the author explores the representation of interpreters by the media. Once again, interpreters are removed from the ivory tower (Diriker 2004) where they are seemingly uninvolved in interactional dynamics, and their visibility is questioned in the context of the broader social environment in which they operate. The results confirm the generally low professional visibility of spoken interpreters, with the exception of football and healthcare interpreters. Underpinned by tensions within political communication, Diriker identifies a shift towards a more negative media image of diplomatic and conference interpreters, while sign language interpreters are represented more positively. However, it is noteworthy that phonocentrism (hearing bias) is advanced as a possible reason for the latter. Diriker concludes by underscoring the marked shift towards negative coverage of spoken interpreters. She posits that this may be due to the de-mystification and trivialisation of the profession over time or to the polarised political atmosphere in Turkey. Indeed, further research is needed to reveal not only the construction of (social) media representations but also their reception and social influence. Rising public (and client) awareness of the specifics of the profession as well as active efforts to increase interpreters’ visibility may contribute to its development.

The specifics of the profession and, in particular, the understudied topic of the interpreter’s relational agency is the focus of Delizée and Michaux’s research. They examine a collection of interviews conducted with therapists and patients during interpreter-negotiated French-Russian psychotherapeutic consultations. The authors apply politeness theory to a thematic contextual analysis in a descriptive and exploratory study of the therapeutic alliance. Furthermore, discourse markers are used to elicit information from excerpts of recorded consultations about the relationships between patients, therapists and interpreters. The authors skilfully discern the agency of interpreters in co-constructing the triadic alliance needed to obtain a positive therapeutic outcome. By using their emphatic capacity, the interpreter can protect and develop a patient’s relationship with a therapist, and the interpreter’s relational agency can encourage patients to open up. To achieve this result, relational agency must be part of the interpreter’s toolkit, but the therapist must also be able to work with the interpreter. It is noteworthy that none of the therapists interviewed had completed training on cooperating with interpreters. Therefore, the authors suggest that relational mediation be addressed when training both interpreters and therapists, offering them an opportunity to discuss the procedural, cognitive and emotional mechanisms that allow the therapeutic alliance to develop and thrive. This is an important conclusion, since discursive strategies can build or dismantle relational continuity, thus impacting the patient’s experience (Rodríguez Vicente, Napier, and de Pedro Ricoy 2021). Rising public awareness of the importance of mental-health interpreters as guardians of the triadic alliance may increase the visibility of yet another evolving interpreter’s role.

By applying a similar analytic lens to the interpreting process and product, Gumul shifts attention from practice to training, aiming to reveal the motivations of trainee interpreters when performing explicitations in simultaneous interpreting. To uncover the motivations behind and perceptions of performed explicitations, Gumul collects self-retrospective reports and manually analyses the interpreting product. The results of the study, comprising 120 participants, suggest that the students most frequently report using ideational explicitations as a coping strategy because they are still struggling with the technique of simultaneous interpreting. As a consequence, these explicitations are more often oriented towards self-preservation than towards improving communication with the target language audience. In the case of textual explicitations, the motivations of trainees include improving textual cohesion and avoiding ambiguity in addition to easing the processing effort in interpreting. In conclusion, it seems paramount to improve students’ awareness of potential agency and attitude shifts caused by cognitive strain sufficiently early in their training so that the habit of unintentionally modifying the intended message is not instilled. A retrospective discussion of the consequences of additions and specifications that can lead to a changed point of view for the speaker may be eye-opening for students. As practitioners, researchers and trainers, we should reflect on the role of adequately trained interpreters to be interpreting teachers (and ‘masters’) who examine and discuss the errors of students (‘apprentices’) in the safe space of an interpreting classroom.

We hope that this special issue contributes to the ongoing debates within interpreting studies on the nature of interpreters’ roles. The previously discussed ISIT conference inspired insightful reflections on the changing environment in which interpreters operate shortly before the pandemic struck, further accelerating the technological and visibility shifts that were identified during the conference. Nevertheless, our special issue demonstrates the value of exploring changes to interpreting practice, training and contexts through social lenses that look beyond the current technological revolution.

Acknoweledgements

This endeavour would not have been possible without the trust that ISIT Paris bestowed in my vision of Discuss Interpreting conference that is at the origin of this special issue. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the contributors for their patience and indulgence during challenging times. My deepest gratitude goes to Kilian Seeber for precious guidance and advice at the decisive, initial stages of this publication. I would like to commend the anonymous reviewers for their meticulous work and enlightening correspondence. I am also indebted to Loredana Polezzi and Rita Wilson for their editorial expertise and incessant support. Special thanks go to Junnel Arvie Fernandez for the technical assistance. Finally, I would like to thank my family, Alberto and Nékané Zoé, for their loving encouragement and dedicate them this volume.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). The views expressed are purely my own and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alicja M. Okoniewska

Alicja M. Okoniewska Ph.D. is Associate Member at the Institute of Intercultural Communication and Management (ISIT) at Paris Panthéon-Assas University. Her research interests focus on socio-cognitive aspects of conference interpreting, computer assisted conference interpreting and multilingual political discourse analysis in institutional settings. She is a member of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC), former Academic Director of Conference Interpreting at ISIT and EU-accredited conference interpreter and trainer. Finally, Alicja is Policy Officer at the DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission.The views expressed are purely her own and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission.

Notes

1. European Masters in Conference Interpreting, https://www.emcinterpreting.org/emci/core-curriculum [accessed 25 August 2022].