Who is an interpreter?

Abstract

Although so-called ‘non-professionals’ are no longer instrumentalised in research solely in order to compare and contrast them with ‘professionals’, this does little to change the lasting perception of two clearly demarcated categories. Such a differentiation may be meaningful in some contexts, but it often over-simplifies and certainly perpetuates a hierarchical order. In my contribution, I will present an alternative, flexible typology in the form of a map that tries to take into account the multifaceted variety of interpreting and translation phenomena that we encounter in social practice. This typology is based on the empirical insight that a binary differentiation between ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ translation or interpreting is not always sufficient to capture adequately the complexity of empirical practice.