Legal wiretapping has gained importance in law enforcement along with the development of information and communication technology. Understanding the language of intercepted persons is essential for the success of a police investigation. Hence, intercept interpreters, as we suggest calling them in this article, are hired. Little is known about this specific work at the interface between language and law. With this article, we desire to contribute to closing this gap by focussing particularly on the translational activity. Our study identifies a fragmented field of research due to the difficulty in accessing workers in this specific field who interpret in a highly confidential phase of criminal investigations. The findings, which are drawn from scarce studies and our empirical data derived from an online questionnaire for a pilot study in Switzerland, demonstrate the wide range of the performed activity intercept interpreting. This article is the first to present translational activity from the perspective of intercept interpreters. The activity differs in many ways from interpretation in court hearings or police interviews. Hence, we suggest categorising interlingual intercept interpretation as a translational activity sui generis and—since previous research has not done justice to the ethical and deontological questions that intercept interpretation raises—advocate for further transdisciplinary research in this field of translation.

Interpreters face distinct challenges when deployed remotely via video link, due to their virtual presence but physical absence in the conversation. Depending on the interpreting service, interpreters can also be exposed to greater spontaneity and hence increased pressure if video-mediated interpreting is offered as an instant service. The examples discussed in this paper draw on an interpreting studies-based analysis of the Austrian pilot project “Video-mediated interpreting in healthcare.” In this study data were generated by means of an observational protocol, five recordings of authentic video-mediated interpreted communicative events, five retrospective interviews with the interpreters from the recorded video-mediated interpreted communicative events, and eight expert interviews with all interpreters from the pilot project. The scope of this article is to present some of the main findings and draw attention to a crucial strategy used in remote interpreting, namely a reliance on relevant sensory awareness.

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