Presence in “No-Place”: On the Nature of Cognitive and Psychological Aspects of Remote Interpreting

Abstract

This article presents a review of the concept of presence in technology-mediated interpreting research. It briefly considers a theoretical framework behind presence as a multidimensional category that deals with the integrated nature of spatial and social experience in mediated environments. The review encompasses twelve English-language articles identified through keyword search in the Scopus database, covering studies of remote interpreting scenarios in both community and conference settings. A closer look at the presence definitions brought together in this review shows that although interpreting researchers draw on the theoretical considerations from Telepresence Studies, there is no unified approach to defining presence. In interpreting research, the term ‘presence’ can refer to both interpreters’ subjective experience and the fact of technological mediation (virtual presence opposed to physical presence of an interpreter in the room). Lack of presence experienced by an interpreter is also referred to as alienation, isolation, detachment, feeling of distance, lack of involvement, and difficulty grasping the intentions of the speakers. While interpreting scholars ultimately aim to mitigate psychological discomfort caused by remoteness, they rarely specifically document interpreters’ presence experience. Therefore, in their framework, presence often overlaps with the concepts of immersion, involvement, cognitive absorption, and flow. The distinction between social and spatial presence phenomena is often disregarded. Thus, presence serves as an instrumental label, a causal factor in the assessment of interpreters’ psychological wellbeing and their attitude to the new workplace configuration. While this does not go against the general understanding of presence as a subjective experience conjured by media exposure, this approach does not fully utilize the broad explanatory power of the models of presence that take into account the influence of mediation on such key interpreting mechanisms as attention allocation, cognition, memory, imagination, spatial orientation, and anticipation. In this regard, a more comprehensive treatment of presence can be found in the foundational papers by P. Mouzourakis and B. Moser-Mercer, as well as in more recent applied studies of cloud-based RSI. Integrating process models of interpretation and presence may offer a more holistic perspective for future remote interpreting research.