Editorial [in The Interpreters' Newsletter 20 dedicato al Dialogue interpreting, 2015]

Since the publication of Wadensjö’s Interpreting as Interaction (1998), research conducted on real-life interpreter-mediated encounters has significantly contributed to recent advances in Dialogue Interpreting (DI) research. Availability of authentic DI data is however limited, due to technical and methodological concerns, such as accessing data and getting permission to use them for scientific purposes; conversational phenomena characterising dialogue-like data which can hardly be annotated or extracted automatically; and time-consuming tasks like data collection and transcription, ultimately influencing analysis. Despite the current lack of DI large corpora, a number of independently conducted investigations are providing substantial evidence of how interpreters translate and of the reasons why they do it that way, showing the gap between “professional ideology” and “professional practice”. This gap, in some cases, turned into all-out prejudice hampering the development of a common ground and a coherent profession, and relegating DI to an ancillary – if not inferior – position with respect to conference interpreting. As yet only few comprehensive works are overtly devoted to Dialogue Interpreting and most of the debate is currently fed by short focused discussions trying to cross research-to-practice boundaries. Our aim in putting these twelve papers together in a dedicated Issue was to explore the implications of interpreters’ participation in a wide range of settings, and since the need for data-based reflections is still high, the volume is to be intended as a contribution to this field of inquiry.