From practice to theory and back in interpreting: the pivotal role of training

Interpreting research (IR) has so far yielded ‘no major discoveries or applications’ for professional practice (Gile 2001). Today, with access to new and larger corpora and advances in analytic techniques, research on authentic data, and in ‘ecovalid’ conditions, is developing fast, but conclusions will necessarily remain tentative for the foreseeable future, and uptake by professionals indirect at best. However, IR has helped to conceptualise and model interpreting to pedagogical effect. Currently, therefore, the most direct route for interpreting research and theory to benefit professional practice is still through training, initial or remedial. Changing markets are posing several new challenges to interpreter training: multilingualism, shifts in language demand and distribution (with more demand for work into B), increased pressure to accept fast, ‘multimedia’, recited and remote input, and the need to rejuvenate an aging profession. An effective pedagogy adapted to contemporary and future conditions must (i) reset objectives by ‘working back’ from a realistic picture of the balance between client expectations, inherent constraints, and the potential of expertise, as derived from research on authentic data and situations; (ii) tap rich seams of relevant theory in cognition and communicative interaction that have been relatively neglected in the past; and (iii) take the pedagogical challenge seriously, with more attention to such aspects as progression, simulation, usable feedback, consistent and credible evaluation and testing, and putting ourselves in the student’s (and later, the client’s) place.