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Community interpreting

In brief

SPA Interpretación para los servicios públicos

origins

Community (or public service) interpreting is a relatively recent coinage (end of 20th century)
referring to an interlinguistic and intercultural communication that serves the community and takes
place in and for the public services, be it legal (police, asylum, prisons), medical or educational

other names

Unlike the terms bilateral or liaison, which are not linked to a particular setting but refer to the way in
which interpreting is performed (short exchanges, normally without note-taking, double
directionality), the term dialogue interpreting has settled as “the most comprehensive designation for
interpreting in non-conference settings” (Hale 2015), whereas the term social interpreting reminds
us that its users are not members of elite groups engaging in unidirectional communication (at
international summits), but rather belong to a social group that needs to communicate with others to
exercise their rights (within the welfare sectors), or operate in any other areas of life, from lodging
conflicts within neighbours’ associations, teacher-parent meetings in educational contexts, to all kind
of health and legal matters. Community interpreting covers the same definition but is preferred on
grounds of its widespread usage by the academia.

abstract

Community or Public Service Interpreting (PSI) describe the linguistic mediation allowing speakers
of the societal language to communicate with linguistic minorities, granting the latter access to
services on grounds of equal rights.

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Although the role of community interpreters has been crucial throughout the evolution of human
civilization, this branch has a relatively recent trajectory in the academic world. Community
interpreting is defined as the result of linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity among segments of
population worldwide and their need for interaction (be it through spoken or signed languages) with
administrations and service providers. From this perspective, community interpreters are the
guarantors of communication, implementation and protection of the rights set forth by international
treaties and institutions. According to ISO 13611/2014, community interpreting is needed in 6 main
settings, and interpreters must have 16 professional competencies and 7 skills, perform 12 functions
and take on 6 responsibilities.

Academic research on interpreting began in the 20th century with the aim of creating teaching tools
through which (self-taught) experienced interpreters could transmit their expertise to younger
generations and it soon went on to reflect on interpreting as a discipline, giving rise to landmark
works on the analysis of communicative needs, professional requirements, situational variables, and
interpreting process and product descriptions. A sustained and systematic research in Community
Interpreting is related to the beginning of the 21st century when aspects of a psychological and
social nature started being addressed together with basic issues such as quality, ethics, or roles.

Any approach to the field of Community Interpreting cannot ignore definitions given by the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies (Pöchhacker 2015) and categories selected by the
ISO13611/2014 as academically and professionally fundamental for the discussed topic. The
terminological prolixity denoting difficulty in delimiting the span of the branch (due to the multitude of
factors intervening) as well as issues related to training and professionalization will be tackled.

record

Catalina Iliescu Gheorghiu

2022
Iliescu Gheorghiu, Catalina. 2022. "Community interpreting" @ ENTI (Encyclopedia of translation
& interpreting). AIETI
[Link]
[Link]

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Entry

SPA Interpretación para los servicios públicos

contents
Introduction | Liberté, fraternité, égalité... | The ethics of community interpreting | Controversial
issues | Research | Training | Research potential

Introduction
The development of communication (analogical, then digital) and transnational financial and political
relations, together with lower prices popularizing transport from the mid-20th century on, made it
necessary to respond to an ever-increasing demand for multilingual communication, which led to the
professionalization of translation and interpreting. Many universities worldwide started offering
Translation and Interpreting degrees in the nineties, when new countries added to the list of
“classical receivers” (USA, Canada, Australia) of migrating population and became the temporary or
final destination of many African, European, Latin-American and Asian migrants, regardless of
whether these citizens migrated for economic or labour motives, fleeing from poverty and
unemployment, seeking refuge from conflict or war, or in some cases, forging from a privileged and
affluent position a better future for their offspring. In the case of countries such as Spain or Portugal,
an important segment of population is represented by retired citizens from developed countries (in
search of sun, greater purchasing power and prompter health care services), who become
“residents”, a term which, unlike its less fortunate synonym “immigrants”, allows for a dignified
status. Thus, Community Interpreting was born as a result of linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity
among segments of population worldwide and their need for interaction (be it through spoken or
signed languages) with administrations in countries where (according to international law) linguistic
minorities’ right to communicate and access services needs to be protected. Community Interpreting
is required in: legal settings (such as police stations, prisons, asylum formalities, whereas judicial
proceedings in courtrooms or tribunals would generally fall into Court Interpreting), social services,
public institutions, health care, educational systems, business and industry, as well as in newer
contexts such as faith-based organizations, emergency and disasters, military instances,
newsrooms, theatres, and alike. From this perspective, community interpreters are the guarantors of
communication, implementation and protection of the rights set forth by international treaties and
institutions.

Two of the particularities that have been identified as specific for community interpreting are: its
double directionality, which makes it cognitively more demanding, and its social status, which is far

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from (if not inversely) proportional with the difficulty of the task. Hale (2015) distinguishes a third
one, which she explains in the following terms: “the need for interpreters in these settings is often
more real than in international conferences, where participants can often speak a lingua franca […]”.
This degree of “real need” that Hale mentions as indicative of the domain has not been thoroughly
investigated so far and deserves, perhaps, further debate.

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Liberté, fraternité, égalité...

The presence of immigrants can be beneficial for demographics and economy, but it can also give
rise to tensions if the “host” country lacks the means to integrate them, or the adequate policies to
articulate a mature and provident coexistence. As intercultural communicators, interpreters bear the
heavy burden of helping to prevent and solve conflicts, alleviate racism and xenophobia and
facilitate a harmonious coexistence of different cultures. But do states acknowledge this role? How
have countries worldwide coped with the migration phenomenon during the last three decades?
Their attitudes seem to have changed between the hopeful nineties, marked by the communist block
collapse, and the gloomy two-thousands, marked by the capitalist stock-markets’ collapse.

Globalization on the one hand, and the technological revolution on

the other, have showed us that human mobility has come here to
stay and is now part of an irreversible reality. People do migrate
as they always have in history, but their number has increased as,
in fact, global population has. In 2020, 281 million, representing
3.6% of world population were on the move according to the
International Organization for Migration. A great part of this
migration is a consequence of colonialism, exploitation, poverty
and wars. Although there is still much work ahead, some
governments have become aware of the fact that migrants are not
commuters and states cannot just call for them when they need to
cover jobs not wanted by the locals and then send them back
when economic crisis and the fall of the financial markets trigger
populist measures based on discriminatory and racist precepts.
On the other hand, some migrant “exporters”, such as former Crises trigger the need for
communist countries, call for their drained brains and qualified community interpreters &
workers to return and rebuild their more or less destitute translators.
economies, while refusing to shelter refugees from war zones.

The outburst of the COVID-19 pandemics has brought a new global economic crisis. Aggravated
poverty is provoking more migration, more human trafficking, more neo-slavery. NGOs warn against
the subhuman conditions in which migrants work in different parts of the globe and their high
exposure to contagion. This multileveled crisis is already having an impact on interpreting studies
and especially on community interpreting with some branches in high demand, for instance Disaster
Relief Interpreting (DRI) known to relay on volunteers, although in such contexts, as Pöchhacker
(2015: 110) acknowledges, interpreting is part of the emergency management plan.

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For the purposes of this contribution, the focus will be set on the first two decades of the 21st
century as the period of the worldwide rising of community interpreting as a separate branch of
interpreting studies. The permanent growth of migration flows during these two decades determined
an increase of linguistic diversity which has often short-circuited communication due to linguistic
barriers in the destination countries, generally between service-providers and service-aspirants, who
are not proficient in the societal language. Community Interpreting (often performed voluntarily,
without socio-professional recognition and therefore “inferior”) has become visible to local, regional
and national authorities in a growing number of “receiving countries”, which must cope with a huge
amount of displaced groups and devote a part of their budgets to integration policies, abiding not
only by their government’s directives, but also by international bodies’ requirements in response to
migrating phenomena. If in the late nineties and early two-thousands supranational structures such
as the EU or the UN devoted a large amount of their efforts to migration, the millennial agenda
brought new and pressing priorities.

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The ethics of community interpreting

In her attempt to draw an international map of deontological codes and accreditation systems,
Bancroft (2005) highlighted that in Africa, interpreting was almost absent, except for South Africa,
with a professional association guided by its own ethical code. Asia did not offer a very distinct
panorama, although an exponential growth in interpreting awareness on behalf of the Chinese
academic community was registered. On the contrary, Australia, New Zealand and Canada showed
an advanced level of professionalizing, with deontological and ethical codes and systems of
accreditation. In Latin America, Conference Interpreting was still the best positioned among the
professional branches with numerous emergent associations, while the “old continent”, governed by
the AIIC in Conference Interpreting, stood out in Community Interpreting during the first decade of
the 21st century with the National Centre for Languages in the United Kingdom (since 2011
integrated in CfBT Education Services), and the British National Register of Public Service
Interpreters.

But do AIIC rules cater for the needs in Community Interpreting? Obviously, conference interpreting
ethic codes and quality standards are better than nothing, but the social field has its own
peculiarities and complexities, and the distinction by sub-fields (with their specific needs) is
paramount lest the debate be barren (like a comparison between a simultaneous interpreting
dealing with wood processing and a call from hospital emergencies about the allergic reaction of a
child).

Instead of a panoramic by continents, Martínez-Gómez (2011) opted for groups of countries

classified into: those who deny the necessity of a professionalised field and do not apply generic
codes to community interpreting (Japan, Brazil); those who provide ad hoc solutions in contexts
where generic codes do not apply to community interpreting (Italy, Spain, Belgium, France,
Germany, Austria, South Africa, Denmark); countries that offer generic services and grant
certification for several settings (Russia, Canada, United States, Low Countries, Norway, Finland)
and finally, those who offer integral services guided by codes of ethics and national certifications for
community interpreting (Australia, Sweden). For a description of the latter, see Hale (2011), who
brings positive impressions shared by professionals in Australia (who feel “feel they are duly

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respected as professionals by service providers and service recipients alike”) to counter for usual
feelings of denigration, and Norström, Fioretos and Gustafsson (2012) who describe and analyse
the working conditions in Sweden and find a tension between professionalism and de-
professionalization which affects the rule of law and integration.

These two mappings (Bancroft 2005 and Martínez-Gómez 2011) do not differ from the panorama
described by Setton and Dawrant (2016: 377) with a vast majority of countries in which Conference
Interpreting remains unregulated.

Given this panorama, the observation that we can draw is that governments worldwide have
generally “passed the buck” to local agents, NGOs and universities, who have come up with partial
solutions to improve communication and integration of migrating communities. Pivotal to this
communication is community interpreting, a new yet old domain of Interpreting Studies whose
practitioners, trainers and researchers have to adapt to changing situations and reinvent themselves
permanently to keep the pace with geo-political, socio-economic and linguo-cultural transformations
of current society.

The dynamic nature of this activity is mirrored by the variety of its names (bilateral, dialogue, social,
and public service interpreting) arising from different professional and ideological standpoints. But its
nebulous labelling is not just a terminological issue; it responds to (sometimes deliberate)
ontological and epistemological uncertainties, strategic overlaps and operational hesitations, mainly
between modes and situations of its performance.

Apart from the controversies over its name, Community Interpreting has given rise to some false
equations, which are not exclusive to this branch, (as they can be traced down, in a lesser measure,
also in Conference Interpreting). However, Community Interpreting displays a higher heterogeneity
in terms of expectations on behalf of “committing users” (local authorities, social workers i.e. service
providers) and “receiving users” (social services applicants) than Conference Interpreting in which
communicative situations are more foreseeable and participants are generally acquainted with
interpreters’ roles. I will mention three of these false equations which are frequent in Community
Interpreting: 1) accurate equals literal; 2) bilingual equals interpreter; 3) co-national/co-ethnical
equals advocating ally. The first equation conceives accuracy as literal transposition. Many service
providers expect interpreters to produce a word-for-word rendition, ignoring that a purposeful,
pragmatic and cultural approach would be a more exact definition of “accuracy” in community
interpreting. The second equation takes for granted that any bilingual can perform as an interpreter,
which determines service providers to hire “helpers” or “natural interpreters” who, (according to a
vast literature in the domain) often summarize, introduce own commentaries, ask or answer
questions instead of the allophone interlocutor disempowering her/him. A third equation refers to the
interpreter’s role. As he/she often belongs to the linguistic community to which he/she
operates/works, service providers and applicants tend to consider the interpreter an ally, an
advocate, an involved participant, especially in encounters in which so much is at stake for one of
the parties.

In what follows, two works, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies (REIS) and ISO
13611/2014, will help us better understand what the place of Community Interpreting is within the
realm of interpreting from both academic and professional perspectives.

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The REIS embraces the field with its various domains and
research traditions (not juxtaposed but rather ingrained) following
both a macrostructure (history, profession, settings, methodology)
and a microstructure based on conceptual links, in such a way
that every headword is covered transversally across domains,
modes and settings, not in a top-down mapping but rather in a
bottom-up data driven approach. Several classification criteria
organize the field both professionally and academically. Thus, the
REIS offers a series of binary classifications according to:
modality (spoken vs signed); temporal relation (simultaneous vs
consecutive); modes (in situ vs remote); format (dialogue vs
conference); status (professional vs ad hoc); technological
involvement (human vs machine) and a more complex one based
on the interaction’s nature. Thus, a further distinction is made
between (a) inter-social interactions – covering international
The Routledge encyclopedia of
encounters (diplomatic, political, scientific, business) and (b)
interpreting studies (Pöchhacker,
intra-social interactions, covering institutional, community
ed. 2015).
contexts (legal, healthcare, educational). This criterium surfaces
six different settings treated separately (asylum, mental health, parliamentary, paediatric, police and
prison, of which only one does not fall into Community Interpreting, which means that this is the
domain of intra-social interaction par excellence) and thirty types of interpreting (e.g. machine
interpreting, video-remote, theatre, disaster, business, military interpreting and so on) labelled with
the headword “interpreting” preceded by a qualifier which can in turn be clustered according to the
process’s features.

However, depending on the country and scholarly tradition, not all the research in the field of
community interpreting resorts to such comprehensive schemes, but rather handles a simplified
chart to refer mainly to modalities, settings and types of interpreting, sometimes in an overlapped
and contradictory manner.

According to ISO 13611/2014, community interpreting is needed in six main settings: public
institutions (schools, community centres); human and social services (refugee boards, nursing
homes); healthcare institutions; business and industry; faith-based organizations and emergency
situations. It also enumerates sixteen professional competencies according to which interpreters
should: apply active listening, memory and delivery skills, problem solving strategies, abide by the
code of ethics, improve self-training, support client autonomy, use appropriate register and other of
the kin. Interestingly enough, this section starts by exhorting community interpreters to be proficient
in consecutive, simultaneous, sight-translation and note-taking. These requirements clearly cast out
natural interpreters and ad hoc solutions adopted by some service providers. A list of seven
interpersonal skills is added, including tact, self-control or cross-cultural skills. Also mentioned in
ISO 13611/2014 are the twelve functions performed by community interpreters, among which:
conveying the meaning of all messages without unnecessary additions, deletions, or changes;
managing the flow of communication; requesting clarification; pointing to the existence of a cultural
barrier; refraining from offering advice or opinion. The complexity of a such a “photofit image” of a
professional who has to comply with all these components entailing skills, roles and ethics, may
partly explain the slowness in professionalizing community interpreting. Finally, interpreters are

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expected to take on six responsibilities, as stated by the ISO 13611/2014 norms: they must
adequately prepare for the event; introduce themselves; comply with the schedule; maintain
appearance and behaviour; follow the protocols, and (responding to a recent scholarly topic but an
old practitioners’ problem), raise issues of vicarious trauma.

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Controversial issues

There are two issues underlying Community Interpreting that have generated prolix debates. One
regards remote interpreting, and, especially, telephone interpreting, a modality that provokes
controversy, first, among interpreters: those who insist on the visibility of the communicative event
as a premise to guarantee quality parameters versus those who think that under the profession’s
threats (such as computers replacing humans or the generalized use of English Lingua Franca
(ELF), to adapt means to survive. Secondly, among users, in a medical interview, for example,
providers of the service interested in cost effectiveness versus users of the interpreting –patients
and physicians who have their own agendas regarding the interpreter’s physical presence during
consultations. According to Andres and Falk (2009), physiological studies do not seem to
corroborate the perception that quality in interpreting is higher in face-to-face conditions in which
Wadensjö (1999) observed greater fluidity. The experiments carried out with remote interpreting at
UN, UNESCO, EU conferences, as Postigo, Varela and Parrilla (2013) show, registered high levels
of satisfaction in users, unlike in interpreters, who complained of higher degrees of tension,
tiredness and loss of concentration. Although widely used in community settings, remote interpreting
is scarcely trained.

The other issue is the duality interpreting-mediation. A confusion between “mediators” and
community interpreters has been perpetuated in some host countries such as Spain or Italy (where il
mediatore linguistico e culturale or mediador intercultural is an umbrella term covering various
linguistic services), which legitimized the creation of jobs (at local levels, on the staff scheme of town
halls) for which the selection processes were often based on tailored regulations responding to a
political will, rather than to a general plan to cover a social need. Thus, in some Spanish regions,
members of immigrant communities (who were to a certain degree bilingual and bicultural but had
no specific training as interpreters) were employed as mediators cum interpreters for local
authorities. In Italy, Davitti (2013) acknowledges that interpreters “perform crucial coordinating and
mediating functions” with assimilating rather than empowering results, while Garzone (2010)
ascribes the confusion to the lack of an “institutionalized figure”. Pöchhaker (2008) already warned
about the risk of unclear terms linking interpreting and mediation, such as face-to-face mediation,
remote mediation, linguistic mediation and intercultural mediation, but Arumí (2018) still claims for
scholarly elucidation. This duplicity has been also taken to the classroom, as Setton and Dawrant
(2016: 372) show. They insist on interpreters not acting as “advocates (actively promoting one side’s
interests) or arbiters (helping the parties reach an agreement)” and not accepting the role of
mediators but on request and if ethically justified.

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Research

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Academic research in interpreting began in the 20th century with the aim of creating teaching tools
through which (self-taught) experienced interpreters could transmit their expertise to younger
generations and it soon went on to reflect on interpreting as a discipline, giving rise to landmark
works on the analysis of communicative needs, interpreters’ requirements, situational variables, and
interpreting process and product descriptions. This section will cover some of the milestones and
pole positions in research on Community Interpreting.

A diachronic view

It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that community interpreting attracted scholars’
attention on a large scale. After Shackman’s (1984) handbook that envisaged not only community
interpreters but also the other participants (users, employers), one of the first monographic works
was Interpreters in Public Services. Policy and Training by Baker, Hussain and Saunders (eds.)
(1991) which outlined a diagnosis and claimed for interpreting services (especially in police stations
and courts of justice) in the UK, given that the country was facing, after a strong immigration from
former colonies, a new migration, more numerous, varied and diverse linguistically and culturally.
The book devoted an extended chapter to legislation regarding matters of race, underaged, mental
and physical disabilities, and a ground-breaking discussion on deontological codes for both social
workers and interpreters. One of this book’s novelties is its preoccupation with natural interpreters
as “bilingual staff who ‘help out’ with interpreting”. A didactic explanatory vocation inspired
Translating cultures. An Iintroduction for translators, interpreters and mediators by David Katan
(1999) while Liaison interpreting in the community, edited by Mabel Erasmus (1999) established
parallelisms between Belgium and South Africa as it described interpreters’ training and
accreditation, their professional activity and the presence or absence of codes of ethics. Mason's
collective volume (1999) was a milestone for researchers in this young domain. He grounded his
work in early empirical research in the seventies to identify the scientific community's preference
towards sensitive situations where power, distance and threats to personal face play a role. Other
issues detected by Mason as worthy of scientific attention two decades ago (role conflicts, group
loyalty, participation frameworks, power, distance, image) remain of interest today, especially with
regards to such present-day topics as visibility, ethics, emotions and trauma. An area approached by
Bot (2005), exploring how the therapist–patient relationship may be affected by the variety of roles
adopted by the interpreters in mental health interviews is experiencing a revival. If Mason’s is the
first collection of insights drawing the lines which would characterize the research in the following
years, the monograph by Sandra Hale (2007) was the first scholarly endeavour to give the field of
community interpreting a comprehensive treatment.

Although sign language interpreting is often associated to Conference Interpreting due to the
institutional frame where its intervention is mandatory, there are many non- conference contexts in
which signed languages come closer to minority language interpreting. Research has proliferated in
both fields in recent years as Gile (2017: 1430) scientometrically proved, and the mutual influences
between researchers on interpreting in both spoken and signed languages have definitely enriched
Interpreting Studies.

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To sign or not to sign

Although signed interpreting constitutes from a modal perspective a branch in itself, it falls under
community or conference interpreting in terms of setting. If spoken languages of migrating minorities
are neglected by governments, signed languages, marginalized for ages, managed to place their
priorities on governmental agendas in the second half of the 20th century, first in the US by creating
the RID [Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf] in 1964. By 1972 the RID had its own evaluation and
certification system. Other countries that officially introduced SLI at an early stage were Australia
(where in 1977, the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) was
established, Sweden with interpreter training programs in adult education centres); and Canada,
where the growing interest in community interpreting - both in spoken and signed languages - led to
the hosting in 1995 of the “First International Conference on Interpreting in Legal, Health, and Social
Service Settings”, which, from then on would be known as The Critical Link, the international event
par excellence in Community Interpreting.

In the EU, Article 7 of the directive 2010/13/EU (European Parliament and Council, March 10, 2016)
according to which,

Member States will encourage audio-visual communication services under their

jurisdiction to ensure that their services are gradually accessible to people with a
visual or hearing disability [...]

was amended by directive 2018/1808:

Member States shall ensure, without undue delay […]

and although Sign language interpreting (SLI) made its appearance on TV around 1950 (along with
subtitling and audio description), it is not until the beginning of the 21st century that signed
languages interpreters were hired and trained on a regular basis worldwide. However, the broadcast
time and variety of TV genres offered in sign language is limited, as it is the guidance for best
practices based on test results in this field.

In addition, as technology has progressed and the Internet has turned

into our daily source of information, accessibility gains momentum.
Since the 2000s, accessible public services, websites, voice libraries
have become ordinary. Since societies have grown older due to the
higher life expectancy rate and lower birth rate in developed countries,
media accessibility is essential for the aged not to risk social exclusion.
Media accessibility, understood as a set of theories, practices, services, A Video Relay Service
technologies and instruments providing access to audio-visual media session helping a deaf
content for people that cannot (properly) access it, is tightly linked to person communicate with
Community Interpreting. Anssari-Naim (2020) argues that community a hearing person via a
interpreting should be understood as part of the generic domain of video interpreter (sign
accessibility, with interpreters, who eliminate the communicative language interpreter) and
barriers, as agents of accessibility. a videophone.

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Influential fields, theories and concepts

In the late 20th century, the migratory phenomenon, together with globalization, brought about a
“social turn” in interpreting studies, fuelled by the influence sociology and anthropology exerted on
the whole field of Translation Studies. This led to the application of theories such as Goffman's
participation framework. Sociological frames in communication together with the concept of
narratives, inspired various scholars, starting from Mona Baker’s Translation and conflict (2006),
which opens a debate on the visibility of the interpreter in war zones, a setting criss-crossed by
narratives, political constrictions, power and ideology. Baker delves into the interpreter’s power as
owner of the meaning, an idea already explored by Wadensjö (1998) when describing the interpreter
as a coordinator of the triadic exchange. This gave way to explorations into the paralinguistic
features of the interaction (gaze, posture, gestures) which can be inclusive or exclusive as
combined with power relations.

Still within the sociological framework, Bourdieu's concepts of habitus,

field, capital, illusion, were applied by Inghilleri (2005) to the socio-cultural
context in interpreting and Angelelli (2000) applied Hymes’ ethnography of
communication, whereas Bahadir (2004) tackled interpreters’ social roles
and cultural identities. Pérez-González & Susam-Saraeva (2012)
approached non-professional community interpreting from Appadurai’s
Afghan Interpreter in anthropological perspective, while Iliescu (2012) delved into Le Breton’s
war zone. sociological theory to draw on the symbolic construction of the body in
medical encounters mediated by ad hoc interpreters. The use of natural
interpreters and especially children in doctor-patient communication, is a recurring issue
approached from the affective side and based on early empirical research on emotions.

From the neighbouring field of linguistics, Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness was a prolific
avenue explored by a numerous group of scholars. Still in force today, its applicability to interpreting
is enriched by the counter-concept “impoliteness” introduced by Culpeper (1996).

Beyond linguistics, Cognitive Science, an ‘ally in the shade’ to researchers in (dialogue) interpreting
who have tried to thresh the various processes that take place during this type of rapid, bidirectional
interaction, provides solid scaffolding for scholarly insight in community interpreting. In the early 20th
century, behavioural observation through experimental methods started to be used together with
introspection, which had been an instrument of data collection since the 19th century. After the first
theoretical works (1970s), the eighties witnessed a resurgence of introspective methodology,
concerned with detecting routine and strategic behaviour in translators and interpreters. In the
1990s, the first computerized studies were conducted using an increasingly popular multi-modal
methodology (video recordings, key tracking and eye tracking) that allowed for data triangulation.
However, it was not until the 21st century that cognitive approaches made their comeback, this time
to stay. In a field where study subjects vary and achieving a representative sample size is practically
impossible, psycholinguistic methodology was difficult to apply. However, it gained momentum when
researchers revisited Kussmaul's collective dialogue protocols and combined introspective and
retrospective methodology.

Regarding concepts, quality seems to be among the most prolific and transversal. Hale, Ozolins and
Stern (2009) argue that the interpreter’s techniques and ethics do not suffice to attain an optimum

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quality, the interaction between all participants being equally important. Quality also stands at the
centre of García Becerra, Pradas Macías & Barranco-Droege (eds.) (2013) two volume monography
which focused on the macro-context, best practices, ethical issues and deficiencies in various
countries. Together with quality, explored by the pioneer works of Wadensjo or Pöchhacker, other
issues with a specific impact on community interpreting such as: ethics, history, technology,
terminology, competences, working conditions, training and professionalisation have been highly
productive, as shown in Vargas (2012) or Iliescu and Ortega (2015).

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Training

The general tendency is for universities that offer T&I degrees to base their training on Conference
Interpreting. With the boom of Community Interpreting in the 2000s, still maintaining Conference
Interpreting as an undergraduate subject in the curricula, some universities decided to train their
students in community interpreting at a postgraduate level, either through short intensive or MA
courses, but these are temporary and isolated initiatives rather than long term structured action.
Why is it so? One reason might be that universities and decision-makers take for granted that, as CI
is assumed to represent the highest echelon of the profession, by mastering (some of) its skills,
graduates will automatically be able to perform community interpreting. This has not yet been
proved empirically, although community interpreters are required by the ISO norms to master
simultaneous, consecutive, note-taking and sight translation skills, as we have seen. Another motive
has to do with employability. As long as markets worldwide still hire “helpers” or informal interpreters
instead of professionals, and, on the other hand, as long as governments are so slow in conceding
linguistic minorities a status in their residence country that guarantees them full rights or allows them
to have a voice, there will be no clear job niche and consequently, no structured training and unified
certification in these spoken and signed languages. Shlesinger (2007: 148) criticized the oblivion
and content of some users in front of the inadequate or even absent solutions to the reality of
trained practitioners, who are still exceptions to the rule, with most of the work being performed by
untrained, ad hoc bilinguals. A decade later Setton and Dawrant (2016: 147) summarize the
situation in Community Interpreting training as encouraging. In spite of the inexistence of real
training in some countries, its accelerated character and non-academic framework in some others,
or its unusual aim as a “language enhancement” device in few cases, they conclude that “pressure
for adequate training has been building for some time, and some isolated structured courses are
beginning to emerge”. Gile (2017:1431) remarked the scope broadening, since training goes further
traditional formulae to include “also initial acquisition of basic awareness and skills by less educated
bilinguals and multilinguals in short courses”.

To reach their goals, training courses in community interpreting should be located in areas with
significant immigrant or multilingual populations. The centres must comply with two conditions: the
availability of trainers who are also practitioners and can teach using their own local and recent
experience (based on the linguistic, terminological, cultural and social problems that communication
may raise in that precise region) and the availability of internship programmes allowing trainees to
practice in real situations which are similar to the scenery they will face when being hired. Obviously,
the third condition is that there are employment opportunities for graduates of such courses. So far,
universities have been reluctant to change their curricula and take the risk of training students for a
profession that grants inferior fees and lower prestige than Conference Interpreting. Setton and

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Dawrant (2016) describe existing courses as shorter and focused on a narrower skillset, while
devoting time and effort to “prepare trainees for more varied, unpredictable and psychologically and
emotionally poignant situations than are commonly met in conference interpreting, putting the focus
more squarely on the interpreter’s role and issues of mediation”.

The challenges posed to a global system of formal training and certification that enables a
community interpreter to exercise this profession and expect adequate remuneration and
recognition are related to at least two factors identified by Hale (2015: 1) the relatively frequent
changes in the catalogue of languages required (depending on the migration waves of the time),
which impacts not only the training but also the practicing of community interpreting; 2) the lack of a
universal grid of compulsory requirements which hinders a unified certification system.

Possible solutions envisage non-language specific training as well as combined e-learning and face-
to-face tuition intended to solve the language variety problem. In the post-covid era, with universities
having technologically improved their capabilities, Community Interpreting is one of the fields in
which a virtual community of practice that shares resources and know-how sounds less utopian.

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Research potential

One of the rampant avenues in Community Interpreting combines technological advances with
cognitive science findings. Access to less invasive pupillometry techniques has opened the door to a
new experimental horizon, mainly in conference interpreting (processing efforts, cognitive load) and
timidly in community interpreting by scholars who developed the notions of monitoring and
professional self-concept in community interpreters. Combining methodology from studies based on
screen eye-tracking in translation (Muñoz 2016) with requirements of signed languages interpreting,
Bosch, Soler & Orero (2020) explore the reception by deaf users of sign Language Interpreted
contents on TV. Promising research lines might develop into exploring cognitive processes in
different settings where the emotional load in communication and the highly stressful tasks
performed by the interpreter. Important data on verbal and non-verbal human interaction are likely to
be revealed.

Another prominent research line is the scientometric approach to the scholarly contributions in the
field of Community Interpreting similar to those in the domain of Conference Interpreting that we
owe to historical contributions such as Gile’s or Pöchhacker’s. The existence of corpora and
databases as well as software specialised in data mining allows us to determine diachronic and
diatopic tendencies, stringent issues, think-tanks at a larger scale.

A third domain of interest is signed languages. If sign language

interpreting falls into community interpreting, so do the linguistic
combinations with co-official sign languages in multilingual countries
such as Spain. If deaf and hard of hearing are seen as a “linguistic
minority”, community interpreting should comprise also the diversity of
vernacular sign languages (e.g. Catalan Signed Language) as well as
Health care interpreting.
interpreting for deaf migrating minorities whose sign language is not the
Source Ayuntamiento de
societal one and have to communicate with the non-deaf society via the
Alicante & UA (2019).
signed language of their residence territory or the International Sign

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Language. The more states become aware of their own populations’ diversity, the more such
communication issues authorities in “destination” countries will have to solve and researchers are
expected to keep the pace.

Finally, related to the psychological dimension (emotions, vicarious trauma) that characterizes
community interpreting as distinct from other domains, a new line of research is incipiently
describing communication in situations of grieving, delivery of bad news and end of life situations.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, medical sciences have devoted extensive study to these
aspects and perhaps the time has come for Community Interpreting to contribute to an
interdisciplinary, cross-fertilizing, systematic line of scholarly insight on these matters.

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References

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Angelelli, Claudia. 2000. “Interpretation as a Communicative Event: A Look through Hymes’

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Bahadir, Sebnem. 2004. “Moving In-Between: The Interpreter as Ethnographer and the Interpreting-
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Baker, Mona. 2006. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London & New York: Routledge.
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Bosch-Baliarda, Marta; Olga Soler-Vilageliu & Pilar Orero. 2020. “Sign language interpreting on TV:
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Bot, Hanneke. 2005. Dialogue interpreting in mental health. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN:
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Hale, Sandra. 2007. Community Interpreting. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI:

[Link] [+info]

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[+info]

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Credits

Catalina Iliescu Gheorghiu

An Associate Professor at the University of Alicante, she teaches Interpreting

(English) and Language and Translation (Romanian). In her areas of interest
(interpreting and its training; migration and intercultural communication; theatre
translation) she has published over 50 papers and supervised 4 PhDs. She is
a conference interpreter (30-year already!), literary translator (30 titles) and
author of Introducción a la Interpretación. La modalidad consecutiva
('introduction to interpreting. The consecutive mode'), Traducerea textului
dramatic (2009), Un model polisitemic de analiză comparativă a textului
dramatic din perspectiva traductologiei descriptive (2018), and the editor of
LAIC (2007, 7:2) Intercultural Approaches to the Integration of Migrating
Minorities (Routledge). She co-edited with Jose Lambert Universe-Cities as
problematic global villages (2014, PGET/UFSC) and Insights in interpreting.
Status and developments MONTI (2015) with Juan Miguel Ortega. She is the
head of INCOGNITO research group and a member of the Editorial Committee
of MonTI.

Iliescu Gheorghiu, Catalina. 2020. “A taxonomic analysis proposal for research in Diplomatic
Interpreting” @ Across Languages and Cultures 21/1, 23-41. DOI:
[Link] [+info]

Iliescu Gheorghiu, Catalina. 2020. “The Impact of Specialised Language on Migrant Women’s
Perception of Healthcare Interaction” @ Revue Roumaine de Linguistique. [quod vide]

Iliescu Gheorghiu, Catalina. 2017. “Equatorial Guinean Migrants in Spain. An Analysis of Implicit
Discourse” @ Hispanófila 181, 169-189. DOI: [Link] [+info]

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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License 4.0

Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación (AIETI)

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