Chapter 2

It’s not about the interpreter

While a central objective of any interpreter training is to develop professional language transfer skills, dialogue interpreting sets additional challenges in coping with the interpersonal dynamics and often significantly divergent institutional status, discourse styles and communicative intent of participants. An interpreted encounter exists not for the interpreter, but for these other two or more parties, and the interpreter must perform an often complex act of transferring meaning between two parties with perhaps quite varying dispositions and expectations. Achieving this synthesis of translation competence, interpersonal performance and contextual knowledge describes the objectives of dialogue interpreting education. Such preparation differs in degree and in kind from preparation in other interpreting fields, demanding focus on social and interactional as much as on linguistic features of encounters.