What do people find so hard about communicating with interpreters? Why is it difficult? What’s going on? In search of an answer, I began to compare community and conference interpreting. In each setting there is a different discourse about interpreting among the people who are being interpreted and those doing the interpreting.

I am excited to talk with you today about the real value of interpreting, which is communicating pluralingual relationships into the future. Now, that’s quite a word,pluralingualism, but all it means is two or more languages used at the same time by people interacting with each other.

I’ve been thinking about interpreting in terms of history since the late 1980s, which is when I met Deaf people and began learning American Sign Language. At that time, the American Deaf Community was in the midst of an empowering movement for social change. The Bilingual-Bicultural movement included criticism of signed language interpreters. The criticism focused on what Deaf people called “the machine model” of interpreting. When the profession was established in 1964, it had quickly become dominated by interpreters with weak or no ties to Deaf culture.

I traced signed language interpreting back to its professional origins in Europe and observed the system of simultaneous interpretation at the European Parliament.

The model used in the Parliament came from the famous trials in Nuremberg after WWII. The technology for simultaneously transmitting human voices along different audio channels had existed and been used in a few situations before this, but the event of the War Crimes Tribunal brought “the IBM Translation System” to the world stage.

The idea, the role, and the function of the interpreter was developed and solidified in this intense stew of political, media, and legal pressures, all mixed up with morality and trauma. These social pressures combined with the thrill of engineering to force the interpreter to perform as an impersonal extension of the electronic technology: as a component of the machine.  More.

See: AIIC