Changes in the Interpreting Landscape – New Developments and Old Modalities

This special issue of The Interpreters' Newsletter includes four articles examining to what extent RSI platforms, hybrid forms of interpreting such as speech-to-text-interpreting and CAI tools equipped with automatic speech recognition and AI, are shaping a new landscape for the profession. The impact of CAI tools and AI on speech processing and delivery during simultaneous and consecutive interpreting is still difficult to predict given the many variables that need to be taken into account in experimental studies, from the topic to the kind of meeting, to the age and experience of the interpreters to the different kind of speakers and speech style, to name the most obvious ones. Clare Donovan and Cecilia Manzoni, authors of Remote interpreting: a game-changer for interpreters? provide an extensive overview of the literature and of declarations and position papers of professional associations and organizations on the subject. Positive and negative repercussions for conference interpreters and the profession of the use of simultaneous remote interpreting are discussed. Alessia Valente and Judith Platter describe in their paper how speech-to text-interpreting has developed and gained ground as a service aimed at people encountering hearing barriers. A literature overview of its main characteristics and functioning is provided in the first part. The article reviews and compares the diffusion of Speech-to-text-interpreting and level of regulation in Austria and Italy. A comparative analysis of the current state of STTI dissemination in Italy and in Austria is integrated with the achievements in one country and what still needs to be upgraded in the other. The more favourable situation depicted for Austria could be a benchmark for possible improvements in Italy in this field. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in consecutive interpreting (CI) is analyzed by Michele Restuccia with the help of Sight-Terp, a CAI tool developed for CI and equipped with both ASR and Machine Translation. The aim of using ASR tools as a support for CI lies in the possibility of producing an error-free transcription of numbers, names and figurative language which often may be interpreted erroneously. The study compares the results of consecutive interpretations based on hand-notes with those obtained with the help of Sight-Terp. The online experimental study by Martina Behr, Markus Martini and Pierre Sachse investigated the relationship between working memory (WM) and simultaneous interpreting (SI) by var g cognitive load in the first case and source text difficulty in the SI task. WM and SI tasks were performed online with 20 students of master’s degree programmes in conference interpreting from seven universities in Germany. The WM task had two cognitive load manipulation conditions, low and high. The interpreting task was to simultaneously interpret a four-minute general speech from English into German.