The Critical Link 5

The current volume contains selected papers submitted after Critical Link 5 (Sydney 2007) and arises from its topic – quality interpreting being a communal responsibility of all the participants. It takes the much discussed theme of professionalisation of community interpreting to a new level by stating that achieving quality depends not only on the technical skills and ethics of interpreters, but equally upon all other parties that serve multilingual populations: speakers, employers and administrators, educational institutions, researchers, and interpreters. Major articles outline both innovative practices in legal and medical settings and prevailing deficiencies in community interpreting in different countries. While Part I, A shared responsibility: The policy dimension, addresses the macro environment of specific social policy contexts with constrains that affect interpreting, Part II, Investigations and innovations in quality interpreting, reveals a number of admirable cases of interpreters working together with their client institutions in a variety of social settings. Part III is dedicated to the questions of Pedagogy, ethics and responsibility in interpreting. The collection is an important reference book catering to the interpreting community: interpreting practitioners and interpreter users, researchers, educators, and students.