Abstract This article reports on an original interview study with 12 professional interpreters who provide interpreting for sex workers at public service institutions, mostly remotely. These consultation appointments focus on health issues and registration requirements and are mandatory under the German Prostitute Protection Act. Our study investigates the challenges interpreters perceive when interpreting in a setting in which private and taboo topics become official subjects of conversation. Our results suggest that, despite the taboo context, interpreters do not find working in such consultations particularly problematic. The challenges mentioned relate to terminology and technical jargon, besides the specifics of remote interpreting, such as the lack of visual information in the case of audio interpreting. The study participants also stressed the need for cultural sensitivity, accompanied sometimes by a shift towards utilitarian decision-making, particularly in those languages in which sex work is perceived as a more noticeable social taboo. Some situations, such as perceived intersectional vulnerabilities or suspicions of forced prostitution, trigger stronger emotional discomfort among interpreters, raising the question whether interpreters have adequate coping strategies at their disposal.
Inadequate interpreting services contribute to maternal health disparities among women who require support. Video remote interpreting (VRI) has been promoted as a solution, yet its implementation and sustained uptake remain uneven and poorly understood. This study draws on the non-adoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread and sustainability (NASSS) framework to examine the challenges shaping VRI use in the UK National Health Service's (NHS) maternity care. It analyses a dataset involving women requiring interpreting support and their families, support workers, maternity care professionals, interpreters, bilingual health advocates, language service providers, trainers and a commissioner. The data sources included interviews, surveys, ethnographic observations, a focus group and documentary materials. The qualitative data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and were integrated with descriptive statistics across NASSS domains. The analysis shows that the adoption of VRI is shaped by interrelated challenges spanning the NASSS domains, including unpredictable demand, technological constraints, contested value propositions, adopter training challenges and organisational, regulatory and workforce factors. The findings suggest that linguistic diversity functions as a complexity multiplier which amplifies and interconnects implementation challenges across domains, while the effectiveness of VRI depends on the sustainability and governance of the interpreter workforce. These findings highlight the need for ecosystem-level coordination that includes the linguistic, organisational, workforce and technological dimensions of interpreting-assisted maternity care.
Interpreting quality is often discussed in relation to users' perceptions, yet most user-oriented evidence is derived from surveys or experiments that only partially capture the way evaluation unfolds under broadcast and platform conditions. This article examines the real-time reception of simultaneous interpreting in a digitally mediated public event, focusing on a remote audience. Their unsolicited evaluative discourse is produced in a livestream chat rather than in co-present interactions. The dataset comprises 1,405 interpreting-related posts drawn from the YouTube livestream chat accompanying TVBS News's broadcast of Jensen Huang's COMPUTEX Taipei keynote address (2 June 2024), viewed by more than 50,000 concurrent users during the livestream. The analysis uses a multi-layered coding framework that combines sentiment polarity, Appraisal Theory and categories for non-evaluative discourse. It maps distributional patterns over time and derives recurrent theme clusters. The results show that audience reception is dominated by competence-oriented praise. Viewers also collectively monitored the interpreting setup, such as handovers and technical features. A substantial share of the posts engaged in speculation about agency, attributing the output to artificial intelligence. This speculation often precedes substantive quality criteria. These patterns highlight how platform-specific features and reduced status and authority cues shape the pragmatics of evaluation, which intensifies both criticism and appreciation. The study extends user-oriented quality research by theorizing platform-mediated SI reception as a socially negotiated process. Within this framework, quality judgements emerge from the public negotiation of access channels (e.g., source vs interpreted streams), identity attribution (human vs machine) and participation norms.
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.
