This groundbreaking study explores Simultaneous Conference Interpreting (SI) by focusing on interpreters as professionals working in socio-cultural contexts and on the interdependency between these contexts and actual SI behavior. While previous research on SI has been dominated by cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches, Diriker’s work explores SI in relation to the broader and more immediate socio-cultural contexts by investigating the representation of the profession(al) in the meta-discourse and by exploring the presence of interpreters and the nature of the interpreted utterance at an actual conference. Making use of participant observations, interviews and analysis of conference transcripts, Diriker challenges some of the widely held assumptions about SI. She suggests that the interpreter’s delivery represents not only the speaker but a multiplicity of speaker-positions, and that this multiplicity may well be a source of tension or vulnerability, as well as strength, for interpreters. Her analysis also highlights how interpreters negotiate meaning in SI, and underscores the need for more concerted efforts to explore SI in authentic contexts.

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Simultaneous conference interpreters, like all other professionals, operate with a ’professional identity’ that shapes, and is shaped, by the way a variety of actors and institutions inside and outside the field of activity see and describe the profession(al). Departing from the assumption that the professional image of conference interpreters is largely (meta-)discursive in nature, this paper analyzes how various actors and institutions depict conference interpreting and interpreters in their discourses, whether the images propagated converge or diverge from each other, and what the divergences may imply for the profession and the professional.

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