Abstract The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has introduced new opportunities for interpreter education, particularly in creating interactive, adaptive and personalized learning environments. This study investigated how undergraduate students taking a Chinese-to-English consecutive interpreting course (with English as their B language) engaged strategically with a customized GenAI assistant over eight weeks. Drawing on more than 600 recorded prompts and iterative class reflections collected across four exercises, we examined the way the students progressed from passive content requests to metacognitively informed dialogic interactions with GenAI. Guided by a dual framework aimed at integrating interpreter competence and metacognitive development models, the course embedded GenAI use within pedagogical scaffolding, including peer collaboration and instructor-led discussions. The students showed a clear progression in their prompting behavior, increasingly demonstrating strategic planning, critical feedback evaluation and reflective learning. Once the students had the skills to engage in meaningful goal-oriented prompting, they used GenAI not merely as a feedback tool, but also as a dialogic learning partner. These findings underscore GenAI’s potential not just as a technological aid, but also as a catalyst for developing autonomy, critical thinking and metacognitive awareness. This study highlights the importance of aligning GenAI integration with intentional pedagogy to support deep human-centered learning in interpreter training.
This article revisits the commonly held assumption in the historiography of interpreting that interpreters existed as a professional category in Ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom. Focusing on individuals designated by titles compounded with iaA(w) , this article reassesses the fragmentary textual and iconographic evidence often cited in support of this claim. The author argues that these individuals should not be understood as having been interpreters in the modern professional sense, but rather as multifunctional agents of frontier mediation. Their roles — which ranged from linguistic and cross-cultural negotiation to administrative coordination, military supervision and the management of mobility and resources in liminal zones — reflect flexible strategies of border management shaped by circumstance rather than a stable occupational profile. By re-examining the available sources through the lens of function rather than profession and highlighting the anachronistic projections, the tendency to retroactively professionalize the past is challenged. The author proposes instead that the iaA(w) titles designate the adaptable mediators embedded in Ancient Egypt’s intercultural peripheries and offers a historically grounded model of premodern mediation that invites further dialogue between Egyptology and Translation and Interpreting Studies.
The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has introduced new opportunities for interpreter education, particularly in creating interactive, adaptive and personalized learning environments. This study investigated how undergraduate students taking a Chinese-to-English consecutive interpreting course (with English as their B language) engaged strategically with a customized GenAI assistant over eight weeks. Drawing on more than 600 recorded prompts and iterative class reflections collected across four exercises, we examined the way the students progressed from passive content requests to metacognitively informed dialogic interactions with GenAI. Guided by a dual framework aimed at integrating interpreter competence and metacognitive development models, the course embedded GenAI use within pedagogical scaffolding, including peer collaboration and instructor-led discussions. The students showed a clear progression in their prompting behavior, increasingly demonstrating strategic planning, critical feedback evaluation and reflective learning. Once the students had the skills to engage in meaningful goal-oriented prompting, they used GenAI not merely as a feedback tool, but also as a dialogic learning partner. These findings underscore GenAI's potential not just as a technological aid, but also as a catalyst for developing autonomy, critical thinking and metacognitive awareness. This study highlights the importance of aligning GenAI integration with intentional pedagogy to support deep human-centered learning in interpreter training.
European Union Directive 2010/64/EU introduces a defendant's right to receive written translations of documents in criminal proceedings but at the same time it allows Member States to substitute written translations with oral translations or summaries. Through an instrumental case study, this article investigates the implementation and adequacy of substituting written translations with oral interpreting for defendants with limited Dutch proficiency in criminal proceedings at the Court of First Instance in Ghent, Belgium. Our findings reveal that the Court systematically relies on the oral alternative. However, we argue that oral assistance cannot serve as an adequate substitute. This is because of the processes of discursive filtering and entextualization that take place when procedural documents travel between different participants through the criminal-law process, from written to spoken form and from one language into another. These processes may cause reductions, distortions and comprehension gaps. Consequently, defendants with limited proficiency in the language of the proceedings have unequal access to case files and procedural information.
This article revisits the commonly held assumption in the historiography of interpreting that interpreters existed as a professional category in Ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom. Focusing on individuals designated by titles compounded with (SIC) i (SIC) (w), this article reassesses the fragmentary textual and iconographic evidence often cited in support of this claim. The author argues that these individuals should not be understood as having been interpreters in the modern professional sense, but rather as multifunctional agents of frontier mediation. Their roles - which ranged from linguistic and cross-cultural negotiation to administrative coordination, military supervision and the management of mobility and resources in liminal zones - reflect flexible strategies of border management shaped by circumstance rather than a stable occupational profile. By re-examining the available sources through the lens of function rather than profession and highlighting the anachronistic projections, the tendency to retroactively professionalize the past is challenged. The author proposes instead that the (SIC) i (SIC) (w) titles designate the adaptable mediators embedded in Ancient Egypt's intercultural peripheries and offers a historically grounded model of premodern mediation that invites further dialogue between Egyptology and Translation and Interpreting Studies.
Given the rise of video remote interpreting (VRI), it is surprising that there is limited research on interpreters' multimodal management of interpersonal relations in this interpreting mode. This study addresses this gap by investigating how interpreters manage rapport challenges in onsite interpreting (OSI) and VRI. It provides a quantitative analysis of interpreters' use of embodied resources, verbal resources, and strategies when conveying rapport challenges in both modalities. The article analyses 28 video recordings (14 OSI and 14 VRI) involving professional interpreters and role-players in the context of a reception centre for asylum seekers. The interactions were coded using a coding scheme based on Spencer-Oatey's Rapport Management Theory. The findings indicate that interpreters use significantly fewer verbal and embodied resources to manage rapport challenges in VRI in comparison to OSI. The study also shows that interpreters in VRI employ fewer mitigating strategies, which might be attributed to the increased sense of security and physical distance provided by the modality. These findings highlight the impact of VRI on interpreters' multimodal management of rapport challenges and seem to suggest that interpreters possibly adapt their strategies based on the affordances of the interpreting method.
Despite numerous studies revealing how interpreters are rendered invisible and marginalized in media discourse, less scholarly attention has been devoted to cases where interpreters are portrayed as central figures in the news media. Few attempts have been made to examine the narrative dimension of image projection, particularly the ways in which semiotic resources are maneuvered to transform past events into interpreter-centered narratives, constructing an image of interpreters both diverging from and associated with prevailing public perception. Drawing on the notions of news narrative and framing, the current study reveals an unusually prominent and independent image of the Chinese interpreter featured in the Chinese social media news coverage of the 2021 China–US Alaska talks. The study identifies the interpreter’s core image as a “national star” that encompasses three key connotations: a beautiful star, a role model and a national representative. It also unveils three framing strategies that orchestrate multimodal resources to construct the image in news narratives: selective contrasting, temporal reframing and causal configuration. It finally explores the underlying reasons behind the image projection, positioning this atypical image of the diplomatic interpreter against the multiple backdrops of prevailing public stereotypes of interpreters, self-representations of practitioners and broader Chinese political and diplomatic narratives.
Deafblind people have complex interpreting needs that often go beyond interlingual transfer. Their communicative profiles vary across various modes - visual, tactile and verbal - yet comparatively little is known about the repertoire of modes used by interpreters who work with deafblind people. Existing research shows that the communicative capacities and preferences of deafblind people encompass close-range signing, visual frame signing, tactile signing, haptics, print-on-palm, re-speaking and Protactile. This article presents empirical findings of 149 deafblind interpreters' reported practices relating to their mode and frequency of work. Our overview of interpreter practice is followed by an examination of interpreters' training experiences. This mirrors the typical path for interpreters, who first gain sign-language interpreting skills and then develop deafblind-specific sign-language interpreting skills as they start to work with deafblind people. Where pre-practice training was available, it seldom included content on deafblind communication beyond a basic introduction, if at all. Thus, the acquisition of knowledge and skills about deafblind interpreting, for most but not all, usually occurs after commencing work in the field. Focusing on responses that report on the positive aspects of professional development training, we conclude by providing recommendations on knowledge areas, skills and activities that could be catered for during training for interpreters looking to work in this field and also for those already practising as deafblind interpreters.
There has been a growing interest recently in the psychophysiological correlates of interpreting affect-laden content. Such an examination could provide crucial insights into affective language processing in the highly cognitively taxing task of interpreting. We tested how professional interpreters process affect-laden and neutral content when interpreting. Using a multi-method approach, we employed psychophysiological measures (electrodermal activity and heart rate), response times and a self-report tool to study their emotional reactivity to negative, neutral and positive sentences. These were interpreted both from the participants' native language (L1; Polish) into their foreign language (L2; English) and in the opposite direction. We found more pronounced physiological arousal and self-reported emotional states in response to affect-laden content compared to neutral sentences, which was observed in both interpreting directions. Behavioral results (response-time data) also supported these findings, showing longer processing times for affect-laden sentences than for neutral ones. The outcomes offer a novel contribution to the cognitive and affective dimensions of interpreting.
We have recently witnessed a number of studies conducted to employ n -gram-based machine-translation evaluation metrics such as BLEU to assess human interpreting automatically. A major limitation of this research lies in the non-probabilistic sampling of a limited number of renditions. Consequently, the correlation coefficients calculated between machine and human assessments, which serve as a proxy for machine–human parity, lack generalizability. Against this background, we conducted a battery of replications of Han and Lu (2023) in order to evaluate the efficacy of three n -gram-based automated metrics — BLEU, NIST and METEOR — in the assessment of interpreting. Our replications are based on a self-curated corpus involving a total of 1,695 interpretations across different modes and directions of interpreting, based on various source speeches. Following the replications, we also conducted a four-level meta-analysis to produce an overall estimate of the machine–human correlation and to identify potential moderators. Our main findings are that the replication success rate for BLEU was above 95%, followed by NIST (at about 70%) and METEOR (at about 40%); the overall machine–human correlation was r s = .638; and the three significant moderators identified were the direction of interpreting, the reliability of human scoring and the type of automated metrics. Our study has methodological and practical implications for conducting interpreting research and assessment.
Interpreting corpora serve as the descriptive foundation of research and the 'ground truth' against which machine interpreting technologies are evaluated. However, access to corpora remains a critical bottleneck in interpreting studies due to data collection and processing challenges and the absence of interpreting- and translation-specific corpus publication venues. In this article, we present two technical infrastructures that facilitate corpus access: a metadata schema which standardises corpus description and the Unified Interpreting Corpus (UNIC) platform for data and metadata search and publication. Guided by the internationally established FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) and CARE (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics) principles for scientific data management and stewardship, we designed the infrastructures based on a review of 125 spoken and signed language interpreting corpora, relevant international standards and community knowledge and also by using open-source technologies. Feedback obtained from interpreting students, researchers and interpreters demonstrates greater perceived usefulness of and satisfaction with UNIC compared to general-purpose search portals. Overall, we illustrate a value- and consensus-driven path towards optimising the use of interpreting corpora and the careful curation of new ones, which avoids the duplication of effort, helps to chart research directions and fosters co-design with communities.
Professional development (PD) has become a regular, if not mandatory, activity in some occupations. Among interpreters, levels of interest in and rates of uptake of PD appear to vary. In Australia, PD was introduced as mandatory for newly certified interpreters in 2014. From 2019, PD became mandatory for all interpreters wishing to gain or retain the credential 'certification'; this requirement remained optional only for those who retained the old credential of 'accreditation'. This study draws on the responses from more than 2,500 interpreters who were surveyed at the end of this transition period in relation to uptake rates, availability, barriers, benefits, usefulness, alignment to work and future aspirations. PD uptake among the study cohort is more than 80%; however, almost 40% of the participants reported that suitable PD is not readily available. Common barriers to PD uptake include the high cost and unsuitable timing and/or location. Aside from compliance fulfilment, the general benefits to be gained from PD include the acquisition of knowledge and skills in fields that interpreters currently work in and also those in further fields. However, a cross-tabulation of interpreters' perceived need for the augmentation of knowledge or skills and the ability of PD to achieve this yielded mixed results. Interpreters' reported preparedness to attend further PD is at a level higher than their actual reported attendance. Furthermore, PD is not shown to be a clear enabler for those aspiring to a higher level of certification for which further training is otherwise required.
This study evaluated the prevalence of burnout among sign language interpreters in postsecondary settings in the United States. A standardized occupational burnout measure was used in a cross-sectional online survey and was distributed nationally. The findings revealed that 18 percent of interpreters reported experiencing burnout, with significant differences being observed across demographic groups. Specifically, a higher proportion of interpreters with disabilities and LGBTQIA+ individuals reported burnout compared to their peers. This article contributes to our understanding of burnout in the field and could possibly inform retention strategies aimed at reducing interpreter attrition and respond to the overall shortage of sign language interpreters. Further research is needed to investigate the unique stressors and experiences that contribute to burnout, particularly among marginalized groups, in order to raise awareness and to develop support systems.
This article explores the lived experience of signed and spoken language interpreters in the context of Mental Health Act (1983) assessments (MHAAs) in England, based principally on data from 10 interviews from a wider corpus of the Interpreters for Mental Health Act assessments (INforMHAA) study (2021–2024). Informed by Braun and Clarke’s (2022) reflexive thematic analysis and Dean and Pollard’s (2001) Demand Control Schema, the present study investigated the interpersonal demands arising in interpreted MHAAs and the way in which controls are articulated and navigated interprofessionally. The findings reveal adjustments to their practice among a group of experienced interpreters in order to accommodate the interpersonal demands specific to MHAAs, the frames of reference that motivate such adjustments and the extent to which they are consistent with the objectives and practices of assessments under the Mental Health Act 1983 . In particular, they help to problematise the principle of the ‘person at the centre’ when language mediation is required and support targeted interventions to enhance interprofessional working prior to, during and after assessments.
This study examined the mobilisation of linguistic resources negotiated in an interpreter-mediated interaction in a semi-transparent linguistic constellation in which English, a language of widespread diffusion, is one of the languages spoken. The case under study is part of a larger corpus of public service interpreting data collected in Italian healthcare settings. It involved four participants: an Italian paediatrician, a Ghanaian paediatric patient accompanied by his father and a bilingual English–Italian mediator. The semi-transparent nature of the setting is due to the fact that the two languages used in this interaction are at least partially known to all the participants and not only to the bilingual mediator. Therefore, both the doctor, who has a reasonably good command of English, and the patient’s father, who has a limited command of Italian, make use of both English and Italian. Applying conversation analysis, the study examined the practices adopted by the participants to negotiate the different modes of communication available: relying on interpreting or resorting to direct talk in either English or Italian. The results show that the mediator’s task of interactional coordination is highly affected by the semi-transparent linguistic constellation, since the interpreting itself becomes an object of negotiation. The study is able to provide guidance to mediators on how to coordinate interactions in which both interpreting and direct talk are possible, an approach that is particularly appropriate when English is one of the languages used in mediated interactions.
Foreign-accented speech is one of the factors that add to the cognitive load exerted during conference interpreting. In the present study, we investigated the effect of different accents on speech processing during this task in addition to the respective roles played by language proficiency and expertise. We therefore designed a pupillometric study in which we tested both students and professional interpreters. The results show that, throughout the trial, the cognitive effort associated with accented speech processing, as measured by proportional pupil size relative to baseline, was greater in the case of the students. Furthermore, only the students seemed to be sensitive to the type of accented speech applied. At the same time, all the participants demonstrated a similar pupil activation pattern in each trial, which suggests the presence of a generalized ‘cognitive rhythm’ that pertains to the interpreting task. Finally, the results point to expertise rather than language proficiency as a major factor in mitigating cognitive effort in simultaneous conference interpreting.
