Abstract
The spread of communication technologies has generated a demand for interpreting
services in situations where participants are in different locations. Examples include virtual
meetings, online conferences, video links between courts and prisons for pre-trial hearings,
and phone calls between doctors and patients in tele-healthcare. Whilst interpreters
working in these situations are often co-located with one of the participants, the same
technologies have also enabled the rise of remote interpreting, where the interpreters are
physically separated from all other participants in the communication. The different
configurations of technology-mediated interpreting all share an element of remote working
for the interpreter but differ with regard to a range of parameters, including: the location
and distribution of participants; the modes of interpreting supported (consecutive,
simultaneous, or both); the medium of communication (audio-only or audio-video); the
technological basis or platform (hardware-based, i.e. telephone or videoconferencing
systems, or software-based, i.e. cloud-based conferencing applications); and the connection
type (satellite, ISDN, broadband internet, mobile network).
In terms of the technology, telephone- and video-mediated interpreting are the two
established modalities at the time of writing. They are mainly used for consecutive/dialogue
interpreting, catering for bilingual public service and business settings. In settings where
simultaneous interpreting is needed, telephone- and video-mediated solutions require
additional equipment and/or functionality. Such solutions have been developed for
conference interpreting and, to a lesser extent, court interpreting. They were initially
hardware-based, using videoconferencing systems, but more recently, interpreting delivery
platforms using cloud-based web conferencing applications have begun to emerge. These
platforms focus on simultaneous interpreting for multilingual events. The modality of
interpreting associated with them has become known as webcast interpreting or remote
simultaneous interpreting.
The terminology used to refer to different modalities and configurations of technology-mediated
interpreting is not yet standardized. This entry uses distance interpreting as an
umbrella term; telephone-mediated, video-mediated and webcast interpreting for its
different modalities; and remote and teleconference interpreting for the two main
configurations arising from the distribution of participants and interpreters.