Chapter 7: Computer-assisted Interpreting: Challenges and Future Perspectives

Abstract

During the last decades, information technology has played a central role in the language services industry. Translators and technical writers take advantage of dedicated software to reuse already translated texts, to adhere to a customer-specific corporate language, to grant terminology consistency, and so forth. The final goal is to increase quality and productivity. Even if information technology did not have the same impact on conference interpreting, also the profession is undergoing some changes. Computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools have entered the profession only in recent years, but other, more general resources had already influenced the way interpreters work. This is not only challenging the way interpreting is performed, but it may have an impact on the cognitive processes underlying the interpreting task, even on some basic assumptions and theories of interpreting, for example the cognitive load distribution between different tasks during simultaneous interpreting. Yet, the academic debate is starting to take notice of these changes and their implications only now. As a consequence, it almost failed to shed light on and address the challenges that lay ahead: there have been relatively few empirical investigations on the impact of CAI tools; interpreting models have not been adapted accordingly; the didactics of interpreting has received almost no new technologies in their curricula and no proposal has been advanced to increase the quality of CAI tools and to meet interpreters' real needs.

Attention-Sharing Initiative of Multimodal Processing in Simultaneous Interpreting

“…Thus, it created a friendly environment being deployed for scientific research. To date, a limited number of theoretical foundations has been published in exploring real-time captions in simultaneous interpreting (Fantinuoli, 2017a(Fantinuoli, , 2017b, and two computer-aided interpreting tools with automatic speech recognition have been developed (Fantinuoli, 2016;Li, 2018).…”

Text-to-Speech Software as a Resource for Independent Interpreting Practice by Undergraduate Interpreting Students

“…Although computer-assisted translation (CAT) and human-assisted machine translation (HAMT) have been used in the field of translation for decades, interpreting technologies are relatively new. Computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tools have entered the profession only in recent years and represent a significant new trend in the profession (Fantinuoli, 2017;Corpas Pastor, 2018). CAI can be classified into: (i) machine translation, (ii) automatic speech recognition and (iii) speech -to-speech translation systems (Carl & Braun, 2017).…”

Computer-assisted preparation in conference interpreting

“…Considering the fact that information technology has played a central role and has changed the way many professionals work in the last decades, it is reasonable to assume that a process-oriented computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) tool (cf. Fantinuoli, 2017) specifically designed to address the preparatory phase of interpreters could contribute to enhance this task.…”