Dialogue Interpreting

As a comprehensive designation for a broad and diversified range of non-conference interpreting practices, ‘dialogue interpreting’ has gained increased currency since the late 1990s, particularly in the wake of two seminal publications with this title edited by Ian Mason (1999b, 2001). Evidence of this lately acquired popularity is the inclusion of an entry on dialogue interpreting in the second edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Baker & Saldanha 2009) – in addition to the one on COMMUNITY INTERPRETING which had already appeared in the first edition. Although the two expressions have been used as synonyms, the prevailing approach is to view dialogue interpreting as the overarching category, comprising interpreting activities in a broad variety of SETTINGS, particularly ‘in the community’. Leaving aside geographically more circumscribed denominations, such as bilateral, contact and cultural interpreting, the only other label with comparable potential for inclusiveness is ‘liaison interpreting’ (Gentile et al. 1996; Erasmus et al. 1999). The ascendance of ‘dialogue interpreting’ in scholarly publications to the detriment of the latter expression is the result of a theoretical turn in INTERPRETING STUDIES, which has brought to the fore the dialogic nature of many interpreter-mediated encounters, and has come to be known as the “dialogic discourse-based interaction (DI) paradigm” (Pöchhacker 2004a).