ABSTRACT
The spread of communication technologies has generated a demand for interpreting services in situations where participants are in different locations. The systematic use of distance interpreting started in the 1970s in public service settings and has taken a different path from the development of distance interpreting in conference settings. In legal settings, the main reason for the occurrence of video-mediated interpreting was initially the spread of videoconferencing technology in the justice sector in many Anglophone countries, especially for links between courts and remote parties since the 1990s. The gradual replacement of telephone-mediated interpreting with video links in healthcare settings triggered research comparing telephone-mediated, video-mediated and on-site interpreting. Research suggests that technology-mediated communication disrupts the sense of presence because the non-verbal embodied cues that interlocutors normally use become invisible or less effective, resulting in a latent uncertainty about what ‘the other side’ does.
