Basic Concepts and Models for Interpreter and Translator Training is a systematically corrected, enhanced and updated avatar of a book (1995) which is widely used in T&I training programmes worldwide and widely quoted in the international Translation Studies community. It provides readers with the conceptual bases required to understand both the principles and recurrent issues and difficulties in professional translation and interpreting, guiding them along from an introduction to fundamental communication issues in translation to a discussion of the usefulness of research about Translation, through discussions of loyalty and fidelity issues, translation and interpreting strategies and tactics and underlying norms, ad hoc knowledge acquisition, sources of errors in translation, T&I cognition and language availability. It takes on board recent developments as reflected in the literature and spells out and discusses links between practices and concepts in T&I and concepts and theories from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics.

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In a sample of 10 professionals interpreting the same source speech in the simultaneous mode, errors and omissions (e/o's) were found to affect different source-speech segments, and a large proportion among them were only made by a small proportion of the subjects. In a repeat performance, there were some new e/o's in the second version when the same interpreters had interpreted the same segments correctly in the first version. These findings strengthen the Effort Models' "tightrope hypothesis" that many e/o's are due not to the intrinsic difficulty of the corresponding source-speech segments, but to the interpreters working close to processing capacity saturation, which makes them vulnerable to even small variations in the available processing capacity for each interpreting component.

In conference interpreting research, empirical investigation can be classified as observational or experimental. The former can be used for exploration, analysis and hypothesis-testing, and is either interactive or non-interactive. Besides its conventional role of hypothesis-testing, the latter can be exploratory. The main methodological problems in both are related to validity and representativeness and to quantification. At this stage, the most important contribution to interpreting research can be expected from observational procedures. Simple descriptive statistics and uncomplicated quantitative processing of the data still have much to offer.Résumé: La recherche empirique sur l'interprétation peut être classée comme obsensationnelle ou expérimentale. La recherche observationnelle est interactive ou non et peut servir à l'exploration, à l'analyse et à la vérification d'hypothèses. Utilisée généralement pour la vérification d'hypothèses, la recherche expérimentale peut également être exploratoire. Les principaux problèmes méthodologiques dans ces deux démarches se posent en matière de validité et de représentativité et à propos de la quantification. A ce stade, c 'est encore la recherche observationnelle qui présente le plus important apport potentiel. Les statistiques descriptives et des méthodes quantitatives simples gardent un grand intérêt.

La recherche sur les limites de la simultanée dues à la charge cognitive gagne à être menéepar la voie d’analyses locales. Localement, la charge cognitive importée d’un segment dontle traitement n’est pas terminé peut déterminer la difficulté d’interprétation du segment encours de traitement, et expliquer des difficultés spécifiques par langue qui ne sont pasmanifestes dans la conversation quotidienne. Interviennent aussi la distribution de la densitéd’information dans la phrase et les pauses entre les phrases. La manipulation expérimentalede ces dernières et une focalisation de la recherche sur des segments locaux pourraientaugmenter l’efficacité de la recherche empirique sur l’interprétation.