There has been a lot of talk about “the future of interpreting”, as if interpreters are on some kind of collective road trip. And of course, any talk of the future of interpreting inspires quips like the following:

Interpreters won’t be replaced by AI; they will be replaced by interpreters who know how to use AI.

The machines are taking over. Human interpreting has a high chance of going extinct.

It’s not worth training to be an interpreter. There’s no future in it.

The truth is that things are nowhere near as simple as that. To understand why, we need to start with an often misunderstood idea.

Interpreting is interpreting; but it looks different in different places

All interpreters use the same basic skills, have the same basic quality requirements and, contrary to what you might be told, behave in basically similar ways in terms of how they do their work and interact with their clients. In terms of interpreter behaviour and skill levels, there is no real justification for splitting interpreting into court interpreting, conference interpreting, medical interpreting and the like. Interpreting is interpreting.

But there are some important differences. For example, some interpreted events are mostly filled with set piece speeches, prepared in advance, and addressed to a room full of people who have their own set piece speeches prepared in advance. They are less about actually achieving two-way communication and more about making your point and achieving some political end.

This is lightyears away from interpreting that involves deep interaction, conversation, and a deliberate attempt to negotiate meaning or decisions together. The two require a very different approach to interpreting and have very different relationships with technology, terminology, preparation, and interaction.

Some interpreting involves a high degree of terminological specialisation (think appointments with your friendly, neighbourhood neurologist, or a conference on the technical aspects of demolition), while others use much more frequent language. The first type involves a fun dance with specialist dictionaries and termbases, while the second type are more about getting a handle on relationships, conversation dynamics and turn taking.

It’s the same job but with different requirements. Anyone making blanket statements about interpreting really has to deal with the huge amount of variation. Interpreting is interpreting but there is more than enough variation to provide a contradiction to every blanket claim.

Different Clients Need Different Things

For some clients, “good enough” is good enough. They just want a rough idea of what the person said or signed and they will figure out the rest themselves. Others really want someone who has personal experience of what they are interpreting. Still others want thousands of hours of interpreting available whenever and wherever needed.

The effects of technology on each of these clients will be different. We might well imagine that the client looking for thousands of hours of interpreting would jump at the chance of automating some or all of this process. The client who really cares about getting just the right interpreter simply has no need or desire for that kind of automation.

It makes no sense to make blanket statements about interpreting as if all clients were prioritising productivity or as if all clients were in the market for expensive, premium interpreting by people who could sit with them in a high-brow board meeting.

As long as there are differences in client requirements, we cannot and should not make any blanket statements as to the technologies interpreters should use to meet the needs of their clients. It is also disingenuous to argue that technology adoption will have an effect on interpreters’ ability to get work, unless they work for clients for whom those technologies are important.

There is no such thing as “The Future of Interpreting“

With all that in mind, allow me to repeat the only quip that I think works nowadays.

There is no such thing as “the future of interpreting.”

The future of institutional interpreting in large, supra-national organisations will be noticeably different to the future of interpreting in churches. The future of interpreting in small-scale business negotiations will be different to the future of interpreting in doctors’ offices or in regular management meetings, or webinars, or classrooms, or press conferences, or anywhere else.

This is not a return to interpreting settings, as if we could draw neat circles around conferences, courts, medical settings, and “public service” and state that those are the variables that matter. No, we have to look elsewhere. Examining buying patterns, client requirements, the flow of the meeting, the people involved, and even the volume of documentation the interpreters need to handle will tell us a lot more than we could ever find out by looking at “settings”.

Interpreting does not have a single future; it has many. For that reason, we need to dial down the quips and dial up our readiness to listen and adapt. Interpreting everywhere is changing but it isn’t changing in the same ways. How we adapt to that is up to us.