In today´s globalised and multicultural societies, the role of communication facilitators becomes necessary and fundamental. Interest in the topic of Interpreting Studies and interpreting as a profession has increased considerably in the last two decades. Despite all sorts of challenges faced by both conference and public service or community interpreting as professions, the Changing Role of the Interpreter. Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards invites us to reflect upon and critically examine basic concepts such as norms, ethics and quality standards in a variety of sociocultural and professional contexts.
The book has a symmetrical structure as it is made up of four parts, each one of them containing three chapters. The first three parts cover thematic areas written by top researchers in the field, who portray the evolution of the interpreter´s role, while the final section represents a discussion space for renowned authors to reflect and provide their perspective on the issues included in the first three sections of the book. The book also includes an introduction and an afterword section written by the three editors, and the bionotes of the authors, discussants and editors.
Part I provides a detailed analysis of interpreting as a profession and the interpreter´s role from a dynamic sociocultural perspective. The first author, Nitsa Ben-Ari portrays the (mis)representations of “fictional vs professional interpreters” in postcolonial novels. Paola Gentile provides an overview of interpreting as a postmodern profession directly influenced by the globalisation phenomenon and the technological era while Cornelia Zwischenberger describes the findings of a study of conference interpreters´self-perception of their social role.
Part II focuses on ethical challenges and Annette Miner describes the special duties designated interpreters (interpreters who work with the Deaf professionals) have to perform at the workplace in order to maintain relationships and create seamlessness in their work with Deaf professionals. Graham Turner and Brett Best debate the “inconsistent” role of the interpreter and borrow from the medical community the concept of “defensive medicine” as a “me-first type of professionalism” (234) and apply it to interpreting practice by comparing it with “expository interpreting”, which serves the interest of the consumers and not of the interpreter. Şebnem Bahadir sheds light over the role of the interpreter as a professional participant observer in which s/he is positioned as “a third party in a communication setting which were originally designed for two” (124).
Part IIIpresents the concepts of norms and quality within the professional practices. Christina Schäffner addresses the issue of how conference interpreters deal with conceptual metaphors, the cognitive effort required and the strategies adopted considered as evidence of norms. Eugenia dal Fovo examines the relation between norms and ethics from a television interpreting context through the lens of political discourse. Claudia Monacelli and Michael S. Boyd consider the contextual constraints the interpreters encounter in civil proceeding mediation by presenting the data from a EU-funded project entitled Understanding Justice in which the discussion is based on the parallelism between bilingual mediation and the use of interpreters in the same role.
Part IV represents a fertile ground for discussion by scholars in the field who share their observations and reflections on the chapters included in the previous three parts, and who admit the need for further investigations by paying attention to how the research questions are formulated but also to the methods used or “considered more appropriate than others to seek answers in them” (249).
The book gathers a broad selection of articles which portray how the role of the interpreter is being re-shaped as a result of the challenges and changes faced by interpreting as a profession due to social, economic and technological reasons. The book covers a great variety of professional contexts and explores in a complex manner the basic concepts which operate in interpreting: norms, ethics and quality. The data presented in the book are extracted from empirical researches and the final discussions included in part IV add thought-provoking value to the contributions of the authors. All in all, I consider this book as a relevant guide to the study of the role of the interpreter and an extremely useful reference not only for students, researchers and scholars in the field but also for the interpreters themselves.
Anca Bodzer
University of Alcala
E-mail: bodzer.anca@gmail.com