ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overall picture of the development and current status of Interpreting Studies (IS), highlighting some central issues, trends and methods. With some exceptions, interpreting research only began in the 1950s, with significant geographical and disciplinary diversification starting in the 1980s. The term IS was introduced in the 1990s to denote the discipline, then also recognized as a sub-discipline of Translation Studies (TS). IS began a consolidation stage in the 2000s after becoming an increasingly independent branch of TS. While in the initial decades of IS conference interpreting stood at the centre of research, nowadays other fields, such as community interpreting and court interpreting, have also become prominent. Signed language interpreting, also recognized as a branch of IS, has developed rapidly since around the mid-1990s. Issues common to spoken and signed language interpreting research are numerous. IS covers linguistic, cognitive, sociological, cultural, educational, technological, communicative, psychological, pragmatic and many other aspects. Diverse methodological approaches mark research on interpreting. The authors have selected and offer a brief account of the development of some central topics in IS. These include corpus-based IS, research into cognitive aspects and memory, issues such as quality of interpreting, the interpreter’s role and ethics, history of interpreting, aptitude, training and assessment, interpreting strategies, and remote interpreting. The conclusion is that even though IS has covered much ground since its beginnings, with many interesting and relevant results achieved, many issues still remain where – research notwithstanding – no generalizable conclusions can be drawn. This is understandable given that interpreting itself is a highly complex activity involving multiple variables and their mutual interplay, thus also posing significant research challenges.
